Letters 1916-1923 and the ethics of education in public humanities projects

The Letters 1916-1923 project collects letters from a comparatively recent and eventful period in Irish and global history. In many cases, the people whose letters we publish have got living relatives who knew the correspondents in person and want their memories to be honoured. But family members are not the only ones who develop deep emotional attachments to the letter writers. As our project is an on-going public humanities project, the users’ exposure to the material is sudden and strong. We digitize and publish letters which might otherwise have been destroyed or forgotten, and many users tell us that they are touched by the life stories of the famous, lesser-known or anonymous people whose letters they read. This individual and immediate confrontation with the objects of our research is inclusive and democratic, but it also raises the question if public humanities meet academic ideals of “aperspectival objectivity” (Luc Boltanski).