1641 Depositions

The three-year 1641 Depositions project aims to transcribe and digitise the Depositions comprising 3,400 depositions, examinations and associated materials, located in the Library of Trinity College Dublin, in which Protestant men and women of all classes told of their experiences following the outbreak of the rebellion by the Catholic Irish in October, 1641. Collected by government-appointed commissioners, the witness testimony runs to approximately 19,000 pages, and constitutes the chief evidence for the sharply contested allegation that the rebellion began with a general massacre of protestant settlers.

The project will investigate innovative technology to structure and lend meaning to a large corpus of unstructured information. The objectives of this project are:

• To investigate how text analytics and semantic mark-up tools can be used to enable researchers to discover new insights contained within the digital humanities.
• To capture some aspects of the subtle processes by which researchers model the meaning of documents and to make key aspects of their knowledge available to other researchers.
• To prototype and evaluate selected tools which achieve these objectives, using the transcribed 1641 Depositions as a corpus of unstructured humanities content.

Please contact Dr. Séamus Lawless for further information on this project.