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Dear Risto Turunen and dear Ilari Taskinen, thank you for your presentation! Your database of 7000 digitalized letters is really amazing! Thank you because your work is very inspirational for me and it makes me want to integrate some quantitative elements in my Ph.D. research! Out of curiosity, I wonder what other themes you have explored in the letters. Thank you!
Dear Emma, thank you for positive comment!
Our project does not have publications yet (we just started), but in addition to the long-term analysis of the war experiences, we are going to study emotional language in the war letters and how gender affected these emotional expressions. Ilari is finishing his dissertation on the war letters (monograph in English), this could perhaps be a useful reference for you too!
If you want to integrate some quantitative approaches to you thesis, I think one good starting point is this website https://programminghistorian.org/. For example, the lesson on corpus analysis with AntConc https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/corpus-analysis-with-antconc is quite simple (available in French too!) and helpful. We have used AntConc in our project to compare lexical differences between men and women.
Best,
Risto
Thank you very much for your answer! I am going to look at the link!
Ilari and Risto, thank you for your great poster! Very impressive indeed. Are there similar digitalized data sets elsewhere? How unique is your material?
Pirjo Markkola
10.3.2021 09:39
Thank you Pirjo for your kind words! Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) in Amsterdam is starting a project where they will digitalize and study Dutch letters from World War II. Other than that, we are not aware of similar kind of digitalized war letter datasets elsewhere, although they will certainly be produced in the future. The text-recognition technology for hand written material that was developed in European READ-project a few years ago has already been used to digitalize vast variety of autobiographical material in numerous projects. It is probably only a matter of time when more wartime letters, of which there are huge collections around European archives, will also be digitalized.
Ilari Taskinen
10.3.2021 14:12