Preliminary Programme

This paper explores notions of space in letters exchanged by southern European migrants and their families. The construction of ideas of space is an area that historians of migration seldom address—as if an unwritten division of labor has left this line of scholarly inquiry for geographers and mobility scholars. I will endeavor to explore how migrants referred to places left behind, to new places of settlement, and also to their experiences of transit and their notions of being “on the move” and straddling two worlds. Most of the material for this exploration consists of a large corpus of “call letters” sent by Portuguese migrants to their wives and children from the 1870s to the 1920s, asking them to join their husbands and fathers abroad. In addition to discussions about the strategy of migration in a family context and the objectives of temporary or permanent relocation (with their intrinsic evaluation of possible lives “here” and “there”) the trip itself is a central concern of many of these letters, allowing for a revealing exploration into ideas of space, place, and mobility. (Show less)

In Autobiography of a Generation, Italy 1968 historian Luisa Passerini asks: “Why talk about something I didn’t share, in what’s supposed to be an autobiography, albeit a collective autobiography? Why this interpretation from an absence that does not permit the use of the plural subject and requires a tone that is more objective even if fraught with subjectivity? Because … it’s the transition from the few to the many, if not yet to a majority, from the individual to the collection; from private to public. And also because there is a vein in ’68 acknowledged as a worldwide phenomenon that changed and will change the course of our lives, within a process that is not completed and is thus difficult to grasp. Reconstructing it is a way of continuing it and of detecting the next steps.” (Passerini, 1996, 60)
When I consider the collection of migrant love letters that is nearing completion after reflecting, writing, and presenting analyses on the letters and related themes over the past five years, Passerini’s words compel me to make sense of my own journey in developing and completing the project. They remind me of the multiple subjectivities that are reconstructed in the research and writing of a scholarly project of this genre, and the tensions, emotions, and reflections they engender. In this paper I discuss the intersections that emerge in creating an archive of historical documents combined with the process of transcribing and translating the migrant letters alongside the practice of interviewing one of the co-authors as I read, reread, analysed, and reflected on the letters. Here, I explore the ways in which the personal journeys of the migrant love letters and their authors take on additional meaning as they begin to intersect with the personal journeys of the researcher. Relatedly, I examine the tensions that emerge from the memories that are embedded in the text and in the recollections of the writer, as we consider the next steps in writing, reading, memory, constructing, and re/constructing lives through letters.

Reference:
Passerini, Luisa. Autobiography of a Generation, Italy 1968. Translated by Lisa Erdberg. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996. (Show less)

This paper analyses a large collection of migrant letters to study the integration of German migrants in the US. It explores the perceived integration by ‘ordinary’ German migrants in the US between 1820 and 1930. The research can draw on a collection of around 8,000 digitised letters from German-speaking migrants to America which we digitised and made machine readable.
Such letters permit to access the transnational communication network that migrants maintained with their homelands. The letters come from across the United States, accordingly, narratives of integration are likely to be affected by local conditions. Until the emergence of a fully centralised bureaucracy in the US, legislation which affected the life conditions of migrants varied significantly between different states. This paper will be a first attempt to use this variation to better understand the conditions under which migrants felt integrated or not.
Building on existing historiography and social science analysis on migration, the letters allow to systematically track the image of the US that Germans sent back to their country of origin and how they themselves thought about belonging to those larger identities of German or American as well as regional markers of identity. The letter collection is analysed by using corpus linguistics and recent developments in quantitative text analysis. (Show less)

This essay uses corpus and computational methods of analysis to explore concepts of ‘here’ and ‘there’ in a collection of nineteenth century female Irish migrant letters. Around 500 letters are analysed, extracted from a larger collection of Irish migrant correspondence collated by Professor Kerby Miller (University of Missouri) in the 1970s. The essay begins by using corpus tools (including Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff and Kosem, 2012) and Wmatrix (Rayson, 2009)) to identify keywords and key semantic domains within the discourse. These statistically significant linguistic items are then analysed within their wider context to see what patterns in the language emerge and what these patterns might reveal about aspects of migration such as identity construction, assimilation and changing attitudes. Although the dataset used for this study is relatively small (in corpus linguistics terms), the findings show the potential for carrying out this type of analysis across larger digital archives, allowing different datasets to be compared whilst taking into consideration sociobiographic variables such as, for instance, the author’s sex or class.

Kilgarriff, A., & Kosem, I. (2012). Corpus Tools for Lexicographers. In S. Granger, & M. Paquot (Eds.), Electronic Lexicography (31–56). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Available from: http://www.sketchengine.co.uk.
Rayson, P. (2009). Wmatrix. Lancaster University. Available from: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/. (Show less)