Welcome to the Digital Correspondence Community Interest Group

Correspondence, both historical and contemporary, provides a window on human interactions, our personal experiences and social lives. This group explores the linguistic and material facets of correspondence, broadly defined, to understand more about communication practices across the centuries. We focus not only on what was written, and by who, but also how these texts create meaning. We welcome explorations of correspondence from across the centuries and in diverse media (handwriting, print, digital) and evaluate what language analysis can tell us: what are the trends, the themes, the shared concerns over time? How are language resources used to convey identity, construct relationships, and achieve aims and objectives, spanning the personal and the political?

Digital tools are at the heart of our explorations. Corpus collections, including letters, print epistles, emails, and text messages, have transformed our ability to describe and interpret this text type. We explore how our data and its digitization enables or impedes our ability to research effectively. Key themes for discussion and potential development include the factors shaping the availability of correspondence data and how to accommodate that in the creation of correspondence corpora; the capacity to format and capture linguistic and other semiotic modes efficiently, transparently and accessibly; and the areas of interest that digital investigations, in particular, can open up for those working with correspondence across academia, cultural heritage organisations, archives and education.

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ROUNDTABLE: Ethics, Access and Sustainability

17th April 2024: 2-3.30pm (BST – UTC +1hr) on Zoom

Our second event of the academic year is a roundtable on three key points related to digital correspondence archives:

• What are the ethical concerns around using individuals’ correspondence for research, especially where consent was not freely given?
• Who should, or can, have access to this data? How do we balance openness in research against individuals’ privacy?
• How can we ensure the long-term sustainability of these projects and databases, which are often developed with significant investment of resources?

Our Speakers:
• Professor Tim Grant and Dr Sarah Atkins, Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, Aston University – https://www.aston.ac.uk/research/forensiclinguistics/databank
• Dr Jack Orchard and Mark Rogerson, Electronic Enlightenment, Bodleian Library, Oxford University – https://www.e-enlightenment.com/index.html
• Jodie Double, Head of Digital Content and Copyright, University of Leeds Libraries – https://library.leeds.ac.uk/

JOIN US!

Join us on Zoom – no sign-up needed – at https://ucdie.zoom.us/j/61280899457?pwd=NzRRSHEzdks0c05qbURuejF3OVBmZz09

This informal roundtable will discuss the theoretical, methodological and practical considerations of working with correspondence using digital frameworks and techniques. Our three speakers work with a range of correspondence materials – present-day and historical – and will offer perspectives based on their experience of academic, GLAM and professional contexts.

ONLINE via Zoom: https://universityofleeds.zoom.us/j/85352699047

SPEAKERS:

• Julia Gillen, Lancaster University
• Callum McKean, The British Library
• Niall O’Leary, Digital Humanities & IT Consultant

ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS/DOWNLOAD A FLYER FOR THE EVENT

The idea for the Digital Correspondence CIG emerged from a conversation between Rachele, Helen and Mel at the 2022 ICAME conference at Anglia Ruskin university. Rachele was chairing a panel on corpora and letters, and Helen and Mel were presenting some work on Anglo-Scots royal correspondence. It struck us that the panel included papers on correspondence from diverse periods of history, but that digital methods and (often implicit) theory were shared across many of the talks.

When the call for the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association Community Interest Groups was released a few months’ later, we took it as a sign!

Hi, my name is Rachele De Felice and I am a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at The Open University. 

My research interests are in corpus linguistics, pragmatics, workplace communication, and the intersections of these – such as corpus pragmatics. The main sources of data I use in my work are email corpora, such as the emails from the Enron Corporation and the Hillary Clinton Administration. Their large scale – tens of thousands of messages each – and range of interlocutors at different levels of seniority makes them ideal to answer questions about how people in different roles achieve their communicative goals in professional settings.  I have been looking at speech acts such as expressing solidarity, making a request, avoiding a task, giving advice, as well as more complex interactions such as discussing problems, taking responsibility, and agreeing on solutions. I am excited to be involved in the creation of this CIG because, over the years, I have realised that there are many shared concerns and interests among the wider research community, even among colleagues working at opposite ends of the chronological spectrum. For example, from a practical perspective, although emails are digital artefacts, when they are created or preserved it is not usually with linguists’ and DH scholars’ research needs in mind! In the course of my work, I have been grappling with many issues of data integrity, readability, and information blanks that are frequently encountered by those working with other written materials. As for some of the research questions themselves, interrogating the data to understand how language shapes the writers’ self-image and social positioning has applicability at any point in time, not just the late 20th century. I look forward to sharing ideas and discoveries – and frustrations! – with other CIG colleagues, and I am sure I have a lot to learn from the expertise of others.