Love Letter Project comes to an end

The Love Letter Archive has dedicated the major academic project ‘Gruß und Kuss’ to these romantic lines and, in collaboration with members of the public, has researched love letters spanning 300 years. In March 2024, the joint project involving Darmstadt Technical University, the University of Koblenz, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and the Darmstadt University and State Library came to an end.

The letter to ‘Beloved Selma’ was written well over 100 years ago, and the handwriting is now almost impossible to decipher. The researchers collected the letters and spent three years researching them together with members of the public. Designed as a citizen science project, the aim was to provide methodological guidance to citizen researchers in various text- and language-based research practices. In addition to online workshops and digital love-letter sessions, local events were also organised, during which citizen researchers read, transcribed and annotated love letters together.

Possible thematic areas identified within the project include:

• Love in times of crisis and conflict across all age groups
• Long-distance love in mid-life
• The allure of secret love

Another part of the project involved digitising the letters. Software developed by Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences is now being used for this purpose; by analysing the handwritten love letters, it also trains artificial intelligence (AI) to understand everyday language.

Letters illustrate social change

For the Germanists and linguists involved in the project, it is the content of the letters that is of particular interest. This is because social change can be discerned from the love letters. For example, it is evident that, since the 1960s and 1970s, the women writing the letters have expressed themselves with far greater self-confidence than in earlier years. For the researchers, the letters offer the best opportunity to study everyday language from different eras.

The project was successfully completed after three years and was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Further insights into the project can be found under:‘Gruß und Kuss’on SWR aktuell.