Digitisation of cultural heritage

Cultural artefacts are often the subject of research in the humanities and cultural studies. Private letters and written forms of communication – including those by unknown people – constitute an important part of our society’s cultural heritage; however, they are marginalised in academic research because, as a medium of everyday life, they are not considered to have any academic or social value. Whether something is regarded as a cultural artefact is often decided by institutions; the ‘cultural canon’ or ‘cultural heritage’ should be understood as a dynamic and socially negotiated phenomenon that reflects prevailing social power relations. Particularly marginalised cultural assets outside the established canon, such as private letters, face the challenge that their collection and preservation, as well as their systematic cataloguing and digitisation, are neither demanded nor supported by any institution or the public. They are therefore not subject to uniform archiving practices or standards. Their owners are often unaware of the cultural and scholarly value of the letters themselves. However, as sources of everyday life, they offer important insights into the linguistic, historical and social conditions of their time. For example, they reflect the everyday circumstances of their authors, the communicative customs and practices, and the language use of their time and place of origin, and are thus relevant to various research disciplines. They complement or ‘correct’ official sources and are therefore important research data for the analysis of specific cultures, languages, societies and social interaction. All major linguistic corpora (e.g. DeReKo [1], DTA [2], DDD reference corpora [3]) consist of edited public texts; private communication and language are generally not visible. In the case of archival collections, letter corpora and corpora or editions of other personal documents, texts by well-known people or from established networks are generally collected (cf. e.g. the Marbach Literary Archive [4], the Propyläen Edition [5], editions indexed via correspSearch [6]). Exceptions include, for example, the Field Post Archive [7], the German Diary Archive [8] and the Love Letter Archive [9].

Digital research processes require a comprehensive and reliable data foundation in order to achieve valid and reliable research results. To create this and enable the re-use of data, a responsible approach to research data and adherence to standards and principles are essential. The FAIR, CARE, Open Access and Creative Commons principles provide guidelines for academic practice. There is as yet no established balance that equally reconciles the many principles governing the digitisation and cataloguing of research data. However, such a balance would be very useful for all memory institutions and archives that preserve and safeguard cultural heritage, as well as for all research disciplines and researchers working with cultural heritage.

Research questions

The digitisation of large corpora of letters presents enormous scientific, legal, IT and ethical challenges. This doctoral thesis therefore focuses on questions regarding how sustainable and long-term access to cultural heritage – particularly marginalised cultural heritage – can be facilitated in accordance with international standards, and further analyses how machine-readable and interoperable digitisation and IT-supported analysis of cultural heritage within its historical context can be achieved.

In particular, the consistent application of all these principles is a task that has not yet been resolved. This applies especially to collections of private letters from civil society – regardless of their temporal or geographical context. For example, the following challenges must be addressed:

1. How can letters be digitally catalogued and made (re)usable in accordance with the FAIR principles without them having to be transferred to an institution, so that the owners, as required by the CARE principles, take responsibility for their research data without being colonialist?
2. How can research data be made visible and publicly accessible despite the CARE principles, and how can the creators/owners participate and have their rights protected despite the FAIR principles?
3. Which technologies can make this possible, and how must the data be modelled?
4. This is already clearly evident in the example of letters written by well-known or famous (male) people; in recent years, there has been an increase in the cataloguing of such material, made possible by technology. How can these mechanisms be applied to letters from marginalised groups, and where do different or new challenges arise?