Research project
Supervisor Professor Michael Toolan
For my research project I am working with Kerby Miller, Curators Professor in the Department of History at the University of Missouri. Over the course of his career Prof. Miller has accumulated an extensive collection of Irish-American immigrant letters, memoirs, and narratives dating from the 17th to early 20th century. This collection is currently in paper format and would benefit from digitisation and TEI mark-up. For my PhD I have taken a small sample of the collection (20 families / 900 letters) to create a pilot corpus of Irish American immigrant writing which will later be used for content analysis of various types (including linguistic, discoursal, and comparative cultural analysis) to see what the letters might reveal about experiences of migration. The long term aim is to find funding which will allow us to create a corpus of a larger portion of the data.
Email elm673@bham.ac.uk