Emma Moreton

“I never could forget my darling mother”: The language of recollection in a corpus of female Irish emigrant correspondence

Abstract The post-famine period from the 1850s to the 1920s was a time that saw a significant increase in female migration from Ireland to North America. A small glimpse into the lives of these women – their preoccupations, feelings, perceptions and beliefs – can be found in the letters they wrote home to their families. This article uses a mixed methods approach to analyse the letters of one female Irish emigrant called Julia Lough. First, a close, qualitative reading of the letters is carried out to identify topics and themes within the discourse. Computational methods are then used to examine the language of one of those topics - ‘Recollections’ - to see what linguistic patterns emerge. The essay concludes by discussing how memories of events, people and places contribute to a sense of closeness and attachment between author and recipient.

The Migrant Letter Digitised: Visualising Metadata

Within the digital humanities, social network analysis - using digital technologiesto examine the relationship between people, places and things - has explored awide range of digital communication formats, from emails to tweets. This hasbeen made possible because of the large amount of online digital data and hasspawned many new techniques specifically aimed at analysing very large datasets,often termed Big Data.

Migration Databases as Impact Tools in the Education and Heritage Sectors

There has been considerable recent investment in the digitization of databases, like the Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration (DIPPAM) project, that relate in various ways to the history and Diaspora of Ireland, which has been an area of intensive scholarship since the later twentieth century (see, for example, Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; O’Sullivan, The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity, Vols. 1–6. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992; Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Miller, Ireland and Irish America. Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration. Dublin: Field Day Files, 2008). As such resources were largely designed for academics in historical studies and allied disciplines, their applicability as tools to engage public audiences (particularly in the education and heritage sectors) remains to be tested. In this chapter, we discuss how databases like these can be created and subsequently exploited for a much wider variety of academic and non-academic uses by focusing on two related digital initiatives, namely, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) project currently being undertaken at the University of Bergen and Coventry University’s Digitising Experiences of Migration: The Development of Interconnected Letter Collections (DEM) project.