The letters written home by a soldier during the Great War only show us a snapshot of one day, or series of days, he was living during a war that went on for many years. A soldier's well-being depended on many factors, only some of which we were able to identify and mark up in this project. The type of letters written range in tone from hopeful to outraged, and from reassuring to openly scared. Censorship of letters increased as the war continued, so the content of later years may not be as representative in feeling nor in practical information (such as location and travel) as the letters written in earlier years.
Our sample of 49 letters was written by soldiers from English speaking countries (USA, UK(and countries within, not specified), Australia, and New Zealand). They span the years 1915-1920, so some of them were written after the war had concluded. From this sample, our research aimed to see what soldiers were writing about the most, and how it impacted their well-being as judged by statements that had an emotive quality.
The visualizations for our analysis are still in progress. A sample is presented here of the type of chart which will represent objectives 1 and 2: a stacked bar chart in order of ascending year, for which one bar represents each letter in the corpus.