The UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Digital Correspondence Community Interest Group are hosting a free, online event about immigrant and/or emigrant correspondence.
When: Thursday, 14 January 2027, 10.00-13.00
This event is open to everyone interested in this topic, including (but not limited to) linguists, historians, digital humanities researchers and education researchers/teachers. Postgraduate students are also welcome. You can either attend as an audience member or present. The event will also feature a lead speaker (details below).
Your presentation can range from 5-15 minutes, and can be a work in progress report, or a paper with more concrete findings.
To attend, please fill in the registration form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe_3-vgvd9cUR_I1uAB3iU-oHE_1K2i6Ohi....
Personal data will be kept on a secure, confidential Google form and will be deleted after the event.
If you would like to present, please also send a title and a short abstract (150-200 words) to imogen.marcus@edgehill.ac.uk by Friday 4th December 2026. Any questions in the meantime, please get in touch with Imogen at the above email or co-coordinator Chris Fitzgerald (christopher.fitzgerald@mic.ul.ie).
Research areas might include: (historical) sociolinguists; (historical) pragmatics, (historical) semantics, (historical) discourse analysis, oral history, history ‘from below’, digital humanities approaches.
A variety of methodological perspectives and approaches are welcomed, e.g. quantitative, qualitative, philological, corpus linguistic, ethnographic, archival, multi-modal. The event is open to researchers working on correspondence in both modern contexts (e.g. email, instant messaging) and historical contexts (e.g. letters, dispatches).
Topics might include:
self- and other- reference in writing of (and about) immigrants/emigrants, e.g. reference in relation to stance, positioning, indexicality ego documents dialect the recovery and preservation of linguistic heritage immigrant monolingualism and bilingualism, and/or ideological/evaluative comments relating to them multilingualism and letters language policies, in either historical or modern contexts language contact, e.g. practices and hierarchies in transnational language histories enregisterment (conceptual) spoken and written discourse in immigrant/emigrant correspondence immediacy and distance in the language of immigrant/emigrant correspondence oral history of emigrant experiences orthography and spelling syntax gender, e.g. women’s voices in transit age, e.g. children’s voices in transit, or discourse about childhood/children emotions in immigrant/emigrant correspondence humour about/satire of the culture the emigres join assimilation anxiety Lead Speaker: Carolina Amador Moreno, ‘A transhistorical approach to ego documents – a perspective from Irish English’. Length: 45 minutes with space for comments and questions.
This talk will discuss the value of ego-documents in historical sociolinguistics, engaging with issues related also to (historical) pragmatics, (historical) discourse analysis, oral history, etc. The focus will be on private correspondence, using the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) to illustrate some of the research activity that has been conducted using this corpus since it was devised in 2008.
By turning to CORIECOR, we will take a closer look at how Irish English was recorded through letter writing. CORIECOR contains a large body of personal letters mainly to and from Irish emigrants, sent for the most part between Ireland and the United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Australia, from approximately 1750 to 1940. The talk will offer some reflections on how diachronic corpora can help us identify patterns of consistency across time, as well as trends in usage, and instances of slower types of linguistic change across language varieties. Some of the examples that will be discussed will allow us to see how certain linguistic choices made in the letters show indexicality.
We will also reflect more broadly on how the oral history of emigrant experiences is expressed in the context of written communication in present times, bringing in the transhistorical angle that allows us to measure modern migration experiences across time. The talk will close with some reflections on the recovery and preservation of linguistic heritage; questions related to the use of modern technologies will serve as an invitation to discuss differences between traditional and digital archiving.
CIG site: https://digitalhumanities-uk-ie.org/community-interest-groups/digital-corres...