This week we discussed and looked through letters that were written by Willa Cather. We looked through them on a search tool that allowed us to filter to certain letters that she has written over the years. The tool allowed us to filter out dates. We discussed that this could be useful as we can use our knowledge on historical events to look through certain time periods and see if she mentions them in any way. This could be used to see Cather’s perspective on a certain historical event. There was also a word search bar that would allow users to search for specific words in her letters. There was also a letter ID search bar that allowed for even more specific searches. In class we used the date search bar to filter between the years that World War II happened. This gave us every letter that Cather wrote during World War II. If we were to look through each letter we would hope to find her mentioning World War II as that is what we were searching for. To be even more specific we searched the word “war” to see if she mentioned any wars around the time World War II was happening. The letters also showed who she wrote to as well. So we can see exactly who Willa Cather was writing to. There was also a locations filter that had all the letters in categories based on location. These locations were all cities and she had locations in both the U.S. and Canada. This could also help with finding even more specific events that happened over time. We would be able to see her experiences in other places around the world as well and maybe even historical events that were happening in certain places.
