Migration Databases as Impact Tools in the Education and Heritage Sectors (original) (raw)

Abstract

There has been considerable recent investment by scholars, institutions and research councils internationally in the digitization of databases that relate in various ways to the history of Ireland and its Diaspora, which has been an area of intensive scholarship since the later twentieth century (see e.g. Fitzgerald and Lambkin 2008, Miller 1985, 2008 and O’Sullivan 1992a-f). The collaborative, Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration (DIPPAM) project (http://www.dippam.com/) is an excellent example of such digital initiatives, capturing as it does: (i) Parliamentary papers documenting the social context of Irish Migration (particularly that relating to the key events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as the Great famine, which precipitated the unprecedented socio-demographic dislocation examined in Ó Gráda 2002); (ii) Correspondence and memoirs conveying personal narratives of experience which focus on both historical and more recent migration from Ireland. This collection of fully searchable and browsable text documents is multi-modal in that DIPPAM also contains images and audio files (see Knight 2011). The database has been successfully utilised since its launch in 2011 by a range of end-users like local history societies and schools for projects on the history of Ireland since the 18th century. However, the collection as it currently exists, is not as useful to the museum/heritage and education sectors as it might be. This is partly on account of the fact that DIPPAM was not designed to appeal, for example, to other aspects of the UK’s National Curriculum beyond historical studies. In this chapter, we discuss how databases like DIPPAM can be presented and promoted for a much wider variety of non-academic uses by focusing on two related databases being developed at the Universities of Bergen and Coventry, respectively. The Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) at Bergen is currently a collection of emigrant writings incorporating some of the letter data from DIPPAM (largely late seventeenth to early twentieth century data) as well as an Irish-Argentinian collection (nineteenth century) (Amador-Moreno and McCafferty 2012). Eventually, it will also include migration correspondence from published and unpublished sources housed in archives and libraries in Ireland and abroad so that each twenty-year sub-period of the corpus contains 200,000 words. Once this is achieved, it will become possible to extend the use of the database beyond historical studies so that it also becomes useful for the kind of linguistic analysis that would be relevant to aspects of the UK’s primary school ‘language and literacy’ curriculum as well as secondary school projects in English Language at GCSE and Advanced levels. Given the time-depth of the corpus, coupled with the fact that the writers are of both genders and hail from a variety of locations throughout Ireland, the museum sector will benefit from having access to a corpus that not only captures the linguistic heritage of the region from the eighteenth century but can also be used to track social change longitudinally. This chapter will demonstrate how CORIECOR can likewise be exploited to examine issues of identity and historical integration/alienation described in Corrigan (1992) and which now have particular resonance for the significant numbers of new migrants that have been arriving in Ireland since the late 1990’s (McDermott 2011). Coventry’s Corpus of Irish Emigrant Correspondence (CIEC) is similarly based partially on DIPPAM data but it also includes collections at the Universities of Minnesota and Missouri. For instance, the latter houses the personal archive (well over 5,000 documents) of Irish immigrant correspondence amassed by Professor Kerby Miller, a key figure in Irish migration studies (Miller 1985, 2008). The objectives of the CIEC project are similar in certain respects to those of CORIECOR. Thus, both corpora will be annotated and stored as Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) –conformant XML documents (P5 markup). This scheme is considered to be the ‘gold standard’ and has been adopted for this reason by other project teams whose corpora are described in this volume such as the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. This chapter will interrogate both CORIECOR and CIEC to examine best practices in the digital representation of the contextual, linguistic and even physical characteristics of migration correspondence data. TEI-conformant XML allows the databases to be searched for not only the kinds of contextual historical information provided by DIPPAM but also for linguistic features like the rise of progressive aspect (the BE Ving construction) in Irish English. Annotation of these kinds makes the correspondence more accessible to both expert users as well as the wider public. The creation of these data-sets will also mark the beginnings of an era in which a diverse range of annotated Irish English corpora (historical and contemporary) can be fully exploited by different types of end-user because they have become fully interoperable resources in the manner of the ENROLLER scheme (http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/research/fundedresearchprojects/enroller/) pioneered by the University of Glasgow which serves exactly this function for many of the English and Scottish corpora described in Beal et al. (2007a/b).

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