A NEW €6 million institute at NUI Maynooth will use the most modern technologies to shed light on historical and cultural traditions dating back centuries.
An Foras Feasa, which can be translated as "fountain of knowledge", was inaugurated by Minister for Education Mary Hanafin at Maynooth campus yesterday.
The institute, which is a partnership between DCU, Dundalk IT, St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, and NUI Maynooth, will create 20 research posts, including 12 PhDs and five post-doctorates.
It is the first educational institute in the State to acquire a hyperspectral scanner, which will be familiar to viewers of CSI and other TV crime dramas. This device, normally used by crime investigators and hospitals, will allow researchers to forensically examine documents, analyse handwriting, date documents and uncover text which has been written over. Some 80 researchers are already working in the new centre. They have expertise in disciplines such as Celtic studies, computer science, imaging technology and media studies.
One of their first major pieces of work is the Alcala project, which involves digitising an 18th-century ledger. Researchers are translating and encoding 324 pages of income and expenditure from the Royal Irish College in Alcala, Spain.
When they are finished, the ledger will be searchable and interactive so that a researcher will be able to find with the click of a button how much money the monks spent on wine, for example, in January 1780.
An Foras Feasa has been allocated €5.8 million in funding from the Government through the HEA's Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions.
Prof Margaret Kelleher, director of An Foras Feasa, said that the institute was named to acknowledge poet and historian Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn. The book, written in the 1600s, traced the history of Ireland from the creation of the world to the invasion of the Normans in the 12th century.
"This work did more than any other to transmit ancient Irish learning and traditions to the modern world," Prof Kelleher said.
"We aim to continue in this tradition by building a knowledge base about our country's history and traditions that will not only be of huge benefit to historians and other academics but will make the unique and rich history of our country accessible to all."
Ms Hanafin said that institutes such as An Foras Feasa provided an increasingly important service to academia and to the general public: "By documenting our past and using such advanced technologies to preserve old records, they are securing a rich wealth of knowledge for future generations."
