New Technologies of Research and Digital Interpretation for Early Modern Irish Studies

Abstract

This article outlines the vastly expanded ecosystem of digital projects and resources of use to researchers of early modern Ireland. It traces the evolution of objectives and practice from the earliest goal of making texts visible and accessible, through to the creation of resources that added value to digitised texts and, most recently, the aggregation of resources by making them interoperable (able to speak to each other), as well as enabling users to extract and manipulate data themselves. The tumult of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland – reiterated cycles of warfare, colonial encroachment and resistance, religious reformation, plural ethnicities – means that such research has to be interdisciplinary, drawing in not only historicist and literary approaches but also language specialists, palaeographers, archaeologists, and geographers. Digital modes of representation have opened up this interdisciplinarity, which remains to be fully exploited by researchers. The creation of resources for the study of early modern Ireland should itself be considered an act of research-in-practice. The article concludes by considering the challenges of sustainability, open access, discoverability, and autodidactism.