CNGL Researcher secures funding for work on 1641 Depositions

A CNGL researcher, Dr. Seamus Lawless, has secured funding along with humanities researchers from TCD and The University of Aberdeen for almost £334,000 under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC - British Arts Council) Digital Equipment and Digital Enhancement for Impact scheme, to help devise new techniques to analyse a rare manuscript collection of the 1641 Depositions held by Trinity College Dublin.

This project will build on an earlier £1 million project involving collaboration between Dr. Lawless and Prof. Vinny Wade in Trinity College Dublin and the universities of Aberdeen and Cambridge which led to the recent digitisation of the archive http://www.tcd.ie/history/1641.

The 1641 Depositions are witness testimonies, mainly by Protestants but also by some Catholics, describing their experience of the 1641 Rebellion - one of the most violent chapters of Irish history.
This AHRC funding will allow the researchers to interrogate the database for a variety of information including the development of the English language in Ireland and the settlers' lifestyle there in the 1640s, the language of atrocity appearing in the witness testimony and the reliability of the evidence in the depositions.

Researchers will work closely with IBM in Dublin, one of the world's leading technology companies, and use its LanguageWare© technology to analyse the depositions and to cross-correlate an array of features of the text - a process which would be too complicated and potentially take a lifetime for a scholar to undertake manually.

Dr Barbara Fennell, Senior Lecturer in Language and Linguistics at the University of Aberdeen, who will lead the project, said: "This body of material is unparalleled anywhere in early modern Europe, and provides a unique source of information on the 1641 rebellion.

The year-long project will bring together linguists, historians, digital humanities experts, geographers and computer scientists to create a new interactive research environment.

Dr. Lawless will work with the Department of History at Trinity College Dublin, researchers from the University of Aberdeen, the Digital Humanities Observatory, Dublin and the IBM LanguageWare© Group, Dublin to gather and evaluate their findings.

Coverage in the press today:

BBC News - 1641 massacre accounts examined
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8545972.stm

The Washington Post - Experts explore 1641 Irish slayings of Protestants
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/02/AR201003...