Nicole Lottig is a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, majoring in Anthropology and minoring in Gender Studies. She also studied at Maynooth University during the Spring of 2015, obtaining a Certificate in Irish Studies. During her last semester of college, she got involved in Digital Humanities and fell in love! She has continuously been working on a few projects: Emily Dickinson, The Restoration of Nell Nelson, and, finally, Letters of 1916. Nicole went to two conferences (Keystone DH and ILiADS) with the first two projects mentioned above, and being around people who are very active in the field has made her want to pursue digital studies in the future!
I came upon the Letters of 1916 project on my own during the Fall of 2015 when looking at Maynooth University’s Digital Humanities graduate program. I was immediately motivated to get involved because, just leaving Ireland, and Maynooth University, a few months before with a Certificate in Irish Studies, I was fascinated with Irish history.
The Letters of 1916 project gave me that feeling of still being involved with Maynooth University through digital means. My professor, who is on one of the TEI committees, also remembered hearing about the project when she went to the TEI conference in France and encouraged me to look into it.
One of my favourite letters is this one from Celia Duffin to her mother Maria on 10 February 1916. I was drawn to this letter because I could really relate to how Celia was feeling when writing to her mother from another place having studied abroad for a semester. I can relate to her excitement of meeting new people on her journey and her struggle of finding someone you know in a different place, which led to her not writing to her mother right away like she would have liked to. I love transcribing and text encoding letters like this that I can really connect with.
Although I have not contributed any material letters to the project, I have helped to transcribe and text encode a few letters so far. I chose to transcribe and code some letters because I also have been working to transcribe and code poems in Emily Dickinson’s many fascicles. If you’d like to know more on that the Emily Dickinson project does, you can check it out here: http://dickinson16.newtfire.org/!
I plan to help transcribe and text encode other letters for the Letters of 1916 project very soon!