Some good news! CLaC member Emma Moreton has received Erasmus funding to work with Dr Felix Krawatzek (a Political Scientist at ZOiS, Berlin) on a German and Irish migrant letters project.
This project looks at some of the methodological challenges encountered in analysing what might be described as ‘big data’ – in this case, two of the largest migrant letter collections currently available, those of Irish and German migrants in the US during the 19th and 20th century. The Erasmus funding will allow Felix and Emma to share expertise in using corpus methods for linguistic analysis and topic modelling methods for content analysis. They plan to compare the different methodologies, examining their effectiveness in interrogating migrant letter collections for topics and themes in the discourse. Publication of the results is planned in the next 12-18 months and they will be presenting their initial findings at the History and Text Analysis Conference at the Pireh (Pôle informatique de Recherche et d’Enseignement en Histoire – Université Paris 1), Paris, on 17-19 January 2018.