Analyzing gender clues in war-time letters

Abstract

Many historians struggle with their information needs which cannot be directly served by the information access systems. Satisfying these needs often requires reasoning and interpretation of pieces of information in context, from user-specific viewpoints. One common need in studying historical phenomena is what indicates gender in historical text. We call such textual indicators ‘gender clues’ because they help satisfy information needs regarding the concept of gender. In this article, we analyze gender clues qualitatively and present a typology of them based on a set of private letters from the Second World War in Finland. We also discuss the general need to create metadata to support the historian’s explorations from specific viewpoints, especially in small and noisy collections that are common in the historical domain.