Letters Across the Pond
A Digital Library Project
About the Collection
This digitized collection will include several letters from my mother Patricia Tweedy to her parents, Hoyle and Ruth Foust, when living in Limerick, Ireland with her husband and two small children between 1979 and 1984.
Because I would like to develop a final project that is scalable and modular, and which demonstrates the ability to digitize and organize a wide variety of media linked thematically through the people and places that they reference, I also plan to combine some photos with these letters, tying together people in photos and letters in such a way that users can move from one piece of the collection (letter, photo or other media) to a broader set of items relevant to individuals shown or referenced in that piece. It may be difficult to dig up photos that clearly correspond to the letters' specific content, but I can certainly find some photos taken during the same time period that contain individuals mentioned in the letters, and this will give me the opportunity to connect photos to the textual content of the letters both in terms of geography and the people that are referenced or portrayed in each.
In addition to people and place names, I will also make note of geographic and temporal data where possible, with the hopes of using visualization tools like Simile Timeline and Google Maps to map the production of each piece in time and space. The letters should be postmarked (and temporally identifiable through content), and places of relevance should be easy to geocode, however the photos might provide more of a challenge. While it should be possible to identify places in photos, it might be difficult to pinpoint specific dates on which certain ones were taken, and this is a challenge that I'd plan to tackle as I develop a clearer concept of the project this semester: it motivates me to develop a collection that is flexible in how it stores dated items, so that even pieces that have been "lost in time", so to speak, can be organized sensibly with appropriate referential information.