Migrant Connections: A Digital Research Infrastructure for German American History

More than 6 million German-speaking people migrated to the United Sates in the long nineteenth century. People on both sides of the Atlantic were able to communicate with one another due to an increasingly developed and reliable postal system, technical innovations in the printing press and transportation infrastructures, and rising literacy rates. A diverse communication network of letters, newspapers, and travel guides made it possible for people to continuously receive information about the new world and the old homeland.

Emigrant letters have long been recognized as a valuable source for studies on push and pull factors for emigration, routes of settlement, or integration into American society. So far, research has focused predominantly on those who reported on completely new and exciting experiences from the Americas and brought the new world closer to those who stayed at home. The people – family, friends, or neighbors – who only seemed to consume such reports have rather remained in the shadow of historical research. What did these people answer? What were their perspectives, concerns, or experiences of migration?

To provide source material that could address these questions, the project “Migrant Connections” at the German Historical Institute Washington collects, digitizes, and transcribes letters, which were sent to immigrants in the United States. These sources are embedded in a digital research infrastructure, where they are linked to other socio-historical source material such as diaries, poems, and news articles. By merging these collections, we want to enable research on relational perspectives that addresses topics about patterns of im/mobility and dis/connectivity. Only these sources can provide insight into how emigrants and those who stayed at home, women and men, young and old, Jews and Christians or other religious groups experienced migration-related social, political, or economic challenges.

Migration is a well identified societal challenge in Europe and abroad. Its historical and contemporary complexity cannot be addressed without the collaboration of every concerned citizen. The objective of the poster is to raise awareness about collecting and digitizing source material that does not necessarily represent the elite, but embodies depictions about the daily lives of ordinary people. The poster will display the individual parts of the research infrastructure that range from interfaces, where users can search through the online archive, transcribe and translate sources as well as enrich metadata, a research hub to conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis with the source material, as well as a communication platform for different actors that engage in such digital citizen scholarship. The goal of the infrastructure is to foster research on hidden and neglected sources and simultaneously to inspire and contribute to transatlantic dialogues between people and groups dealing with knowledge and migration who do not usually interact or meet.