Nel legendo i tuoi scritti mi sembra di parlare assieme. Exploring epistolary function and form through topic analysis, in Italian migrant letters in Australia

The persistence of letters throughout history creates an intuitive sense of what a letter looks like andhow to write one. To understand epistolary form, epistolary studies usually investigate functional and formal characteristics in isolation, neglecting the interconnectedness of semantic, structural and functional domains. This project explores how semantic, structural and functional domains of epistolary form do not act in isolation, but rather in combination to form a sophisticated and multifaceted social document. This is achieved using topic analysis on a corpus of letters written by or to Italian migrants in Australia between 1930 and 1987.