Digitising experiences of migration: the development of interconnected letter collections

There is a long history of using letters as a resource for social, historical and cultural studies. Until recently the focus has largely been on correspondence between more privileged members of society, but interest has been growing in the sourcing, preservation and documentation of letters written by emigrants, belonging to all social classes (see, for example, Miller 1985, Kamphoefner, Helbich and Sommer 1988, Fitzpatrick 1994, Gerber 2006 and Cancian 2010). Emigrant letters are expressive and indicative of correspondents' identities, values, preoccupations and beliefs, and are a powerful source of information and understanding about migration issues. Researchers have transcribed the original manuscripts, or scanned them using optical character recognition (OCR), and by digitising letter collections have made them more accessible and, to a certain extent, more searchable by fellow academics and the general public. Unfortunately, however, emigrant correspondence projects have almost always evolved independently of one another. Although they have been successful in tackling important research questions relating to social history and immigration studies, they have not joined forces, or engaged with stakeholder groups from other disciplines who might be able to contribute to our knowledge of the migrant experience.

Moreover, different letter collections cannot easily interconnect if they are simply digitised without further annotation and markup. Annotation could provide new and creative ways of exploring, extrapolating and visualising the content, to see whether features observed in one letter are also evident in other letters, within or across letter collections. Relatively few projects have moved beyond the digitisation stage to examine how new technologies can be used to exploit text content and enhance the usability and searchability of emigrant letter collections.

The purpose of this project is to bring together the various stakeholder groups working with emigrant letter collections to explore the digital potential of these very idiosyncratic documents. Central to this will be the development of a system of correspondence annotation and markup to represent the linguistic, structural, discoursal, contextual and physical properties of the letters, thus offering different layers of meaning and 'ways in' to the texts. This will allow for more sophisticated searches - the outputs of which can then be presented through meaningful visualisations.

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Correspondence SIG, established in 2008, has made some headway in developing a system of markup for correspondence generally. It has not yet addressed the specific features of emigrant letters, which present unique methodological challenges. Through the proposed series of international workshops, TEI experts, archivists, curators, historians, immigration scholars and linguists will be provided with the opportunity to consider ways in which emigrant letters can best be digitally represented in order to offer multi-perspective, cross-disciplinary ways of examining and understanding experiences of migration. Through sharing expertise and knowledge transfer, it is hoped that this work will pave the way for fully interoperable resources, allowing letter collections to speak to different audiences and eventually integrate with other letter collections, thus promoting new ways of understanding and researching. Although the focus of these workshops will be on emigrant letter collections, the discussions can also inform best practice in the markup of other types of correspondence, for example e-mail, benefiting an even wider range of stakeholders working in this field.

It is anticipated that our project will benefit both academic researchers and the public sector, by promoting access to information within and across a range of digitalised emigrant letter collections. We intend to engage with schools, immigrant community groups, museums, public libraries and heritage centres.
We intend to raise public awareness of digital letter collections and demonstrate to the various stakeholder groups how these collections might be used in ways relevant to their own communities, as a source of information about family history, as a resource for cultural studies, and as a stimulus for creative work.
We will engage the public through the following activities:

- Blog and discussion list postings throughout the project.

- A one-day symposium in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum (Coventry) in May 2014. This will be a forum for communicating our activities to representatives of immigrant communities in the UK. We will invite members of the British Association of Ukrainians (http://www.augb.co.uk/) and those participating in the Irish Diaspora discussion list (http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/misc/idl.shtml). We anticipate reaching other such communities and heritage groups through our networking activities for this project.

- A week-long exhibition in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in May 2014, to display letter samples, maps and timelines, and provide information about accessing and searching online letter collections. This will be of particular interest to amateur historians and those from migrant families. Coventry University has strong links with local schools, and we will encourage groups from these schools to visit the exhibition. We will also arrange a visit to the exhibition by Coventry University students enrolled on our new undergraduate degree in creative writing, because we believe that the letter collections are a rich resource for creative work. The exhibition will be a source of additional revenue to the museum restaurant and gift shop, and will also benefit the museum longer-term by introducing new types of visitor.

-The distribution of leaflets and posters about the collections in May and June 2014. Network participants will create these in accordance with the requirements of the heritage groups they engage with, and distribute them in their own countries, with the support of the research centres/institutions to which they belong. For example information leaflets will be made available to visitors to the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum and the Ulster Folk Park Museum, and will be distributed to immigrant groups and museums and libraries linked to the Irish Diaspora Research Unit and the Immigrant History Research Centre at the University of Minnesota.

- Contact with schools and colleges during the final stages of the project (March - June 2014) to explain the ways in which our digital content can be integrated into relevant teaching materials at various levels of study. We will disseminate information via educational websites such as www.dho.ie/drapier and www.irith.org/. Network participants will also engage with schools and colleges in their respective countries, using the lines of communication that have already been built up in their research centres/institutions.