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The processing of correspondences for a digital edition presents similarities with other textual genres, and therefore common methodologies and tools can be applied. However, as correspondence corpora display a reticular presentational organisation and since the related projects often require to progressively gather various sources, publishing through digital media has several advantages with respect to print publishing.
As opposed to most correspondence projects, dedicated to well-known authors or scholarly writings
For a list of projects see Stadler
Another project dealing with the digitisation of this kind of correspondences is
et al., 2016.
Corpus 14 project deals with correspondences from ordinary people
Digitising experiences of migrations:
The development of interconnected letter collections, by Moreton and Nesi (2013-2014,
http://lettersofmigration.blogspot.com). For further information, see also Moreton, 2016; Moreton
et al., 2014.
Grande Collecte was initiated by the
Mission Centenaire
As of August 2018, the corpus is comprised of almost 1800 correspondences written by 37 writers in 11 areas, for a total of almost 500,000 tokens
The current size of the corpus is limited, but future additions are planned; the effort was so far concentrated on establishing a methodology, selecting relevant texts that have been accurately transcribed.
The transcripts were encoded in conformance with the TEI guidelines
The metadata, described by the
TEIheader, includes the
correspDesc element (as defined by the TEI SIG on Correspondence and introduced in the 2.8.0 version of TEI P5), allowing for the identification of sender(s), addressee(s), relationship, date and place of sending.
In addition to the methodological approach followed in the transcription process,
You can access the
Corpus 14 relies on the data representation model provided by the TXM platform
Corpus 14 from
http://textometrie.univ-montp3.fr/
The corpus is also available for download from the Ortolang platform
Access via permanent identifier
https://hdl.handle.net/11403/corpus14
Recent developments of the project mainly concern the semantic annotation of Named Entities, especially persons and places. These are identified following a workflow including both an automated tool, REDEN Online (Frontini
et al., 2016) and a manual annotation, and eventually marked up according to the guidelines of the TEI module for names, dates, people and places. Place references are linked to an external knowledge bases (DBpedia) whenever possible, whereas persons are referenced to an internal index. NEs in the
correspDesc and in the
body are annotated in the same way, but their position in the TEI tree determines their role, so that a simple XPath can return for instance only people and places that are mentioned in a letter. Such analysis shows that places and persons evoked in the correspondences between soldiers and their families are more likely to refer to their previous lives at home. This may be due to the wish of soldiers to maintain the connection with their network and their link to the household environment, which is one of the main functions of these letters (Caffarena, 2005; Gibelli, 2014).
Various ways of visualising information related to people, places and dates in correspondences, especially when it concerns metadata, have been developed by several projects. We cite among others
The Migrant letter (O'Leary and Moreton
, 2017);
Visual Correspondence
Mapping the Republic of Letters
Early Modern Letters Online
Clavius on the Web
The visualisation proposed for the
Corpus 14 project displays each set of correspondences (a soldier and his wife/relatives at home) on the map, with its sender and receiver addresses identified by two distinct colors, as well as markers for places mentioned in the letter
The visualisation (which will be available as a demo on the project's website) was developed in collaboration with Pietro Barbieri, Chiara Capone and Luca Ciccone, MSc students in computer science, supervised by Marina Ribaudo, associate professor at DIBRIS, Università degli Studi di Genova.
This way of visualising spatial and personal information contained in letters brings an additional layer to the reading, as well as to the analysis of
Corpus 14 correspondences, which have already been carried out in Steuckardt
et al. (2015) and Roynette
et al. (2017)
inter alia.