Finding Emotion in a Rural Diary, 1916–18: A Research Note.

A 65-year old farmer and forestry worker in Quebec's Eastern Townships, John Buzzell, kept a diary from March 1916 until December 1918. Although in the third year he lived in the urban setting of Paris, Ontario, it is a typical example of a rural work diary, recording the weather, listing details of his workday, and describing family's and neighbours' activities and health. Such journals furnish social historians with rich detail about rural life but little about the emotions and sensibilities of their authors. This research note proposes and uses two systematic practices, or tools, for addressing the well-known analytic difficulty of recognizing the non-dit and extracting emotion from rural work diaries. Focusing on literary and physical conventions of composition and structured comparison, these two practices can unpack emotions such as sorrow, pride, pleasure, nostalgia, anxiety, and loneliness and help lift the veil of discretion about public and family affairs. Many other kinds of journals or memoirs similarly contain little explicit expression of emotion, and the two tools described in this research note may open more sources and archives, as well as lowering the risk of selecting on the dependent variable, choosing for the study of emotions only diaries that include their unmediated expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]