Metadatos balstīta dienasgrāmatu teksta korpusa analīze

Personal diaries are a unique narrative document of an era, revealing the times and events through a deeply personal perspective. Each diary is undoubtedly unique, having been written in a particular place and time, encapsulating many of the authors’ present-day experiences. However, together they create a special dimension of personal writing, where the individual style is shaped by the author’s taste and writing skills, as well as by the influences of diaristic traditions, fiction and other cultural phenomena. Recognizing the uniqueness and particularity of each diary, in this paper we will focus on personal diaries as a whole and conduct a metadata-driven analysis of a pilot corpus of diaries with the aim of revealing the particularities of the corpus in the juxtaposition of different criteria. This paper is based on recent experience of building a corpus of personal diary texts from the very beginning, i.e. starting with the collection, digitisation and further processing of the material to build the corpus. In this article, we will analyse the creation of the corpus of diary texts, the methodological challenges and the difficulties encountered in such an initiative. The metadata-based measurements that we have taken in the pilot corpus of diary texts can be used to draw conclusions about a corpus or a collection, they can highlight possible trends in general diary-writing habits, but these data alone are not sufficient to draw valid conclusions about the tradition and trends of diary-writing in Latvia.