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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Hi, my name is Imogen Marcus and I am a Senior Lecturer in English Language in the department of English and Creative Arts at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK.  I research variation and change in the English language, present and past, and the relationship between language and technology. I have engaged with medieval letters written in Middle English and Anglo Norman, speech-related language in Early Modern English manuscript letters, and modern forms of correspondence such as email and instant messaging. A recent publication is Marcus, I and Maden-Weinberger, U. 2026. ‘Coordinating and Subordinating Conjunctions in Five Genres Across the History of English’, part of a Journal of English Linguistics Special Issue Complicating Corpus Methods in Historical English Language Studies. I have also developed scribal identification techniques and, with the assistance of research assistant Dr Ursula Maden-Weinberger, created the Transhistorical Corpus of Written English, so I am very interested in transhistorical approaches to correspondence of various forms, as well as issues around the creation of digital tools, data and its digitization. I am currently using a lexical sociolinguistic approach to investigate the vocabulary of defamation in early modern English. I am looking forward to exploring these issues, hearing about new research and sharing ideas with other CIG members.

• Dr Rachele De Felice, Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language (Open University).
• Dr Mel Evans, Lecturer in English Language (with Digital) (University of Leeds).
• Dr Helen Newsome-Chandler, Research Fellow in Forensic Linguistics and AI (Nottingham Trent University). Previously Postdoctoral Fellow at UCD. 

The CIG’s origins

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!

New events to be announced. 

What is this and why is it here?!
Challenges and curiosities in correspondence

Friday June 14, 2-3.30pm

An informal and interactive session that explored the unusual, surprising, and inexplicable things we have found in our own archival research into correspondence, past and present.

The session consisted of 5-10 minute presentations about puzzling finds from correspondence data: a signature in an unexpected place in a letter, an off-topic phrase in an email corpus, an addressee that doesn’t fit the social network of the writer, or even a mole skin(!)… After the presentations, colleaguess from the research and archival worlds discussed and responded to the issues raised. 

We hope to produce the proceedings of the event into an Open Educational Resource.

ROUNDTABLE: Ethics, Access and Sustainability

17th April 2024: 2-3.30pm

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/

This informal roundtable discussed 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.

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