Learning to Read Digital? Constellations of Correspondence Project and Humanist Perspectives on the Aggregated 19th-century Finnish Letter Metadata

This paper discusses a digital humanities consortium project, Constellations of Correspondence - Large and Small Networks of Epistolary Exchange in the Grand Duchy of Finland (CoCo), which aggregates, analyses and publishes 19th-century epistolary metadata from the collections of Finnish cultural heritage organisations as an open semantic web portal. First, we will approach digital literacy from our own experience as humanists operating in a digital environment. We will share how we have learned to work in a hybrid team with computer scientists and have been able to create fluent ways of analysing the data and developing the portal together. Secondly, we will explore the user testing of the portal carried out in spring 2024. It showed that building a committed test group is challenging and that ‘traditional’ humanists have difficulties in studying mass data. However, the user feedback was encouraging, and guides us in developing the portal before its launch.