IRISH AS it was spoken in the wake of the Famine is being brought back to life in a €28 million bid to bring sound recordings from bygone times into the digital era.
A new State-funded research body was launched yesterday to support academics involved in digitising sound recordings, images and documents so they can be made available for public and professional study.
The Digital Humanities Observatory is backed by a €28 million grant made available through the Higher Education Authority's Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions. The grant - awarded before this month's budget cutbacks in education and related sectors - ranks as one of the largest single awards to a humanities research project made anywhere in the world, the observatory's director Dr Susan Schreibman said yesterday.
"We work with the third-level sector where there are many people doing digital projects in the humanities," she said.
The goal of this "e-scholarship" is to help researchers - and also the public - to gain access to rare documents, images and recordings, material often too fragile and too valuable to allow open access. "People should know about them, people should use them," she said. While research was a key element of this effort "there is also a very strong preservation motive".
An example of the work being done in the field is a project to digitise a collection of sound recordings of Irish speakers from Munster, Ulster and Connacht that were captured between 1928 and 1931 by German academic Dr Wilhelm Doegen. He duplicated questions for each region, asking subjects to count to 10 or recite a particular prayer so that variations in language-use could be studied in detail. The usage in some regions would have been very close to the Irish spoken only a handful of decades earlier, during the Famine years, Dr Schreibman said. These voices are being brought back to life and examples are available at www.dho.ie/doegen.html
"One of the ways of preserving these things is getting the content off digitally and once we have it digital we can do more with it," she added.
The observatory was an idea launched and developed by the Royal Irish Academy which will continue to manage the project.
The new body will pool resources and ideas and introduce technology and methodologies to help scholars working with these valuable and nationally important materials that track the course of Irish history. Documents and images being digitised date back many centuries.
Some have restricted access but a growing amount of this material is being made freely available to the public over the internet. The funding should help make Ireland a world leader in this field, Dr Schreibman said.
Other sites associated with the project are Celt (www.ucc.ie/celt/); Irish Resources in the Humanities (http://irith.org/index.jsp); and Irish Script on Screen (www.celt.dias.ie/).
