Translocalis

Goal and tasks

The phenomenon of letters to newspapers developed into a nationwide and pervasive culture of local letters in the mid-1800s Finnish-language press. The Translocalis Project collects and researches this forgotten cultural heritage of 19th century Finland and creates new digital cultural heritage from it. 

The objectives of the project are to: 

1. Collect all the local letters to the Finnish-language press from the era of 1775-1885 

2. Publish this database as a part of the digital collections of the National Library of Finland 

3. Produce the first comprehensive historical research of the phenomenon of local letters. 

4. Prepare a follow-up project that seeks to collect the letters from the turn-of-the-19th-century press digitally in collaboration with computational scientists. 

Currently, there are over 70,000 local letters that have been manually collected by HEX from the digitalized newspaper material with the tools provided by the National Library of Finland. During the collection work, the letters have been enriched with metadata, such as location and the named authors of the letters.