Eleven institutions were involved in the network. The network drew on recent developments in a range of disciplines which use correspondence collections as a primary data source, including corpus linguistics and the digital humanities, history and historical sociolinguistics. The institutions involved are listed below.
Università Degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy (Professor Marina Dossena) – is developing 'A Corpus of Nineteenth-century Scottish Correspondence', which comprises both business and familiar letters, especially by/to emigrants.
University of Bergen, Norway (Professor Kevin McCafferty) - together with Dr Carolina Amador at the Universidad de Extrenadura - are developing a Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR).
Coventry University, UK (Professor Hilary Nesi and Dr Emma Moreton) – specialise in corpus development and analysis and have been involved in several letter projects, including the JISC-funded BT Digital Archives Project).
Niall O’Leary was Project Manager for the Digital Humanities Observatory, Ireland, a research project of the Royal Irish Academy and part of the Humanities Serving Irish Society (HSIS) initiative. The Digital Humanities Observatory developed DHO: Discovery, a portal to collections of Irish cultural artefacts.
Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, US (Patrick O’Sullivan) – former Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit.
University of Helsinki, Finland (Professor Terttu Nevalainen) - developed the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC).
The Immigrant History Research Centre (IHRC) at the University of Minnesota, US (Professor Donna Gabaccia, Dr Sonia Cancian, Dr Daniel Necas) – the Digitizing Immigrant Letters Project (2008 - present) aims to collaborate with a wide variety of institutions in North America and abroad in order to create digital archives of letters written between migrants and their loved ones, to provide their translations into English and promote research of migrant correspondence across disciplines. The Centre's mission is to promote interdisciplinary research on international migration, develop archives documenting immigrant and refugee life, especially in the United States, and make specialized scholarship accessible to students, teachers, and the public.
The Mellon Centre for Migration Studies (CMS) (Dr Brian Lambkin and Dr Patrick Fitzgerald) - CMS houses the Irish Emigration Database which includes 4000 letters by/to Irish emigrants. A new interface was recently created for the resource as part of the AHRC-funded project 'Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration'. Dr Johanne Trew, University of Ulster, is an associate of the CMS and contributed to the research network.
University of Missouri, US (Professor Kerby Miller) - writes extensively on issues surrounding Irish migration and holds an archive of Irish emigrant correspondence containing well over 5,000 letters dating from the late 17th to mid 20th century.
Universität Paderborn, Germany (Professor Joachim Veit and Peter Stadler) – Peter Stadler is one of the conveners of the TEI Correspondence SIG and has been involved in several funded projects relating to the markup of letter collections.
Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands (Dr Anita Auer and Mo Gordon) – together with Tony Fairman (independent scholar) and Professor Mikko Laitinen, Linnaeus University – are currently encoding and annotating a collection of correspondence written during the Late Modern English period, to create the corpus 'Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor'.
We would like to thank the advisory committee members for their help and support during the DEM project. Advisory committee members were:
Dr Geoffrey Barnbrook (University of Birmingham)
Jean Anderson (University of Glasgow)
Professor Karen Corrigan (Newcastle University)
Dr Sheena Gardner (Coventry University)
Other contributors we would like to thank are:
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain (Luis Espinosa-Anke, PhD Student) - Luis is currently working on the implementation of a range of methods for automatic text processing, looking, in particular, at historical correspondence.
Dickinson College, US (Professor Marcelo Borges) - Marcelo is developing a corpus of 19th and 20th century Portuguese migrant correspondence. The project explores the narratives of 'call letters' used at the turn of the twentieth century by Portuguese migrants to ask their wives and children to join them abroad.
Professor Michael Ellis from Missouri State University and Professor Michael Montgomery from the University of South Carolina are developing the Corpus of American Civil War Letters, which currently contains over 6,000 documents.
Università Degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy (Professor Marina Dossena) – is developing 'A Corpus of Nineteenth-century Scottish Correspondence', which comprises both business and familiar letters, especially by/to emigrants.
University of Bergen, Norway (Professor Kevin McCafferty) - together with Dr Carolina Amador at the Universidad de Extrenadura - are developing a Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR).
Coventry University, UK (Professor Hilary Nesi and Dr Emma Moreton) – specialise in corpus development and analysis and have been involved in several letter projects, including the JISC-funded BT Digital Archives Project).
Niall O’Leary was Project Manager for the Digital Humanities Observatory, Ireland, a research project of the Royal Irish Academy and part of the Humanities Serving Irish Society (HSIS) initiative. The Digital Humanities Observatory developed DHO: Discovery, a portal to collections of Irish cultural artefacts.
Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, US (Patrick O’Sullivan) – former Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit.
University of Helsinki, Finland (Professor Terttu Nevalainen) - developed the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC).
The Immigrant History Research Centre (IHRC) at the University of Minnesota, US (Professor Donna Gabaccia, Dr Sonia Cancian, Dr Daniel Necas) – the Digitizing Immigrant Letters Project (2008 - present) aims to collaborate with a wide variety of institutions in North America and abroad in order to create digital archives of letters written between migrants and their loved ones, to provide their translations into English and promote research of migrant correspondence across disciplines. The Centre's mission is to promote interdisciplinary research on international migration, develop archives documenting immigrant and refugee life, especially in the United States, and make specialized scholarship accessible to students, teachers, and the public.
The Mellon Centre for Migration Studies (CMS) (Dr Brian Lambkin and Dr Patrick Fitzgerald) - CMS houses the Irish Emigration Database which includes 4000 letters by/to Irish emigrants. A new interface was recently created for the resource as part of the AHRC-funded project 'Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration'. Dr Johanne Trew, University of Ulster, is an associate of the CMS and contributed to the research network.
University of Missouri, US (Professor Kerby Miller) - writes extensively on issues surrounding Irish migration and holds an archive of Irish emigrant correspondence containing well over 5,000 letters dating from the late 17th to mid 20th century.
Universität Paderborn, Germany (Professor Joachim Veit and Peter Stadler) – Peter Stadler is one of the conveners of the TEI Correspondence SIG and has been involved in several funded projects relating to the markup of letter collections.
Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands (Dr Anita Auer and Mo Gordon) – together with Tony Fairman (independent scholar) and Professor Mikko Laitinen, Linnaeus University – are currently encoding and annotating a collection of correspondence written during the Late Modern English period, to create the corpus 'Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor'.
We would like to thank the advisory committee members for their help and support during the DEM project. Advisory committee members were:
Dr Geoffrey Barnbrook (University of Birmingham)
Jean Anderson (University of Glasgow)
Professor Karen Corrigan (Newcastle University)
Dr Sheena Gardner (Coventry University)
Other contributors we would like to thank are:
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain (Luis Espinosa-Anke, PhD Student) - Luis is currently working on the implementation of a range of methods for automatic text processing, looking, in particular, at historical correspondence.
Dickinson College, US (Professor Marcelo Borges) - Marcelo is developing a corpus of 19th and 20th century Portuguese migrant correspondence. The project explores the narratives of 'call letters' used at the turn of the twentieth century by Portuguese migrants to ask their wives and children to join them abroad.
Professor Michael Ellis from Missouri State University and Professor Michael Montgomery from the University of South Carolina are developing the Corpus of American Civil War Letters, which currently contains over 6,000 documents.
