Written, cherished, scanned: The many lives of a wartime letter

TY - UNPB

T1 - Written, cherished, scanned

T2 - The many lives of a wartime letter

AU - Lange, van, Milan

PY - 2023/4/4

Y1 - 2023/4/4

N2 - In 'First-Hand Accounts of War: War Letters (1935-1950) from NIOD digitised', the (paper) wartime letters in NIOD’s archives are being scanned and transcribed. Digitisation is giving the historical documents in collection 247: correspondence a new life. Many of them have already lived numerous ‘lives’, however, taking on new meanings each time: the war letters were written, read, saved and cherished before becoming part of an archival collection. In this blogpost, I reflect on how letters keep on acquiring new meanings as these developments unfold.

AB - In 'First-Hand Accounts of War: War Letters (1935-1950) from NIOD digitised', the (paper) wartime letters in NIOD’s archives are being scanned and transcribed. Digitisation is giving the historical documents in collection 247: correspondence a new life. Many of them have already lived numerous ‘lives’, however, taking on new meanings each time: the war letters were written, read, saved and cherished before becoming part of an archival collection. In this blogpost, I reflect on how letters keep on acquiring new meanings as these developments unfold.

KW - egodocuments

KW - war letters

KW - digitization

KW - metadata

KW - meaning-making

KW - World War II

KW - citizen science

KW - Archival science

M3 - Web article

T3 - NIOD blog

BT - Written, cherished, scanned

PB - NIOD Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust- en Genocidestudies

CY - Amsterdam

ER -