In November 2015, the Letters 1916 team collaborated with The School of History and the Boole Library at University College Cork for an SFI-funded outreach event. The event involved a workshop and talks and provided an opportunity to digitise letters from the public. Many people attended to find out about the project and to get involved by uploading Cork letters to the collection.
One of the key local organisers of the Cork event was Gabriel Doherty from the UCC School of History. Gabriel told us why they were happy to be involved with the event.
The School of History in University College Cork was very keen to collaborate with the Letters of 1916 project as it represents an invaluable combination of traditional archive and cutting-edge text analytics that offers genuinely new ways of approaching the subject.
There are two major advantages to the Letters of 1916 project. The first is that it brings together into the public domain primary source material that would otherwise either have remained in geographically disparate archives, or, in the case of the material previously held in private hands, remain inaccessible to researchers. The second is improved quality of the textual analysis that is made possible as a result of the application of modern computing techniques.
To catch up on all the activity from that Cork event, click here.