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Paper short abstract:

In my paper, I will reflect on emotions and digitalized archive materials by asking if digitalization could increase our understanding of emotions appearing in archive material or if it is just one of the means for better preserving the material and controlling the past.

Paper long abstract:

As a meaning of folklore is dependent on the world outside it (e.g. performance, social usage, local community), so emotions are shaped and created by their surroundings. Referring to Sara Ahmed (2004) and her notion of emotions as embodied and activated by different surfaces, I focus on emotions through digitalized archive material. What kind of advantages digitalization can offer for understanding and achieving emotions? The problem with emotions of the archive material is their inaccessibility. How to capture emotions when it is not possible to experience the moment of actual performance, and further, whose emotions, in fact, are perceived in documented texts, and to what extent it is about a researcher’s own emotions? The archive material in question consists of digitalized projects of the 19th century oral-literary sources: Elias Lönnrot’s letters, critical edition of the Kalevala, and database of Finnish-Karelian oral poetry. While these digital sources allow open access to every user and create new understanding on massive manuscript materials, digitalization could also guide us methodologically and make archive sources “louder”, more visible – and in some cases –achievable in terms of emotions. By giving a few examples, I will show some contextual and intertextual links between different digital platforms that might disentangle and re-open emotional aspects embedded the sources.