Professor Micheal Ó Siochru
Professor, History
Head of School, School Office - Histories & Humanities

Projects

• Title
  • Empire: Cromwellian Ireland and the Transformation of the English Atlantic World
• Summary
  • The EMPIRE project will explore Ireland"s crucial role in England"s (and later Britain"s) global expansion. The mid-eighteenth century witnessed Britain"s emergence as the foremost power in the Western World, enjoying unparalleled wealth, influence, and geographical reach. But how did it obtain such an exalted position and more specifically, what were the processes that facilitated such a dramatic rise to prominence? This question lies at the heart of the EMPIRE project. Challenging the dominant, Anglo-centric narrative, this project takes a radically different approach, investigating how from the mid-seventeenth century, Ireland provided England with a decisive advantage over its continental rivals on the world stage. Irish historiography focuses primarily on the Irish diaspora in the emerging English Atlantic Empire, but EMPIRE will instead turn the spotlight on the country, rather than its people, as the significant source of finance and resources driving England"s expansion overseas and its global dominance thereafter. To test this hypothesis, the EMPIRE project will integrate traditional historical scholarship with an innovative Digital Humanities strategy to enable a detailed study of the intricate workings of the English government in Ireland. The project will provide access to large volumes of newly recovered records, available for the first time in over a century, since a devastating fire destroyed the original collections in Public Records Office of Ireland in 1922. Collectively, these sources represent by far the most complete record still extant of early modern English colonial administration and finance in the Atlantic World. The project will develop a novel historical methodology, using artificial intelligence to create a digital knowledge base from these newly identified records, exploiting new technologies to extract information from large amounts of raw text and data. This frontier research, therefore, will transform our understanding of the emergence and consolidation of England"s Atlantic Empire from the mid-seventeenth century.
• Funding Agency
  • Irish Research Council
• Date From
  • 2023
• Date To
  • 2027

• Title
  • Books of Survey and Distribution
• Summary
  • This is an exciting collaborative project, working with the Irish Manuscripts Commission and the National Archives to produce a unique and comprehensive research platform for the study of seventeenth-century Irish History. The key outputs will be: . a fully functional online research platform, integrating the Books and Survey and Distribution with the existing Down Survey material; . preparation of the transcribed text with indexes of the Quit Rent Office set of the Books of Survey and Distribution in the National Archives for subsequent publication in print by the Irish Manuscripts Commission in five volumes in 2025.
• Funding Agency
  • Irish Manuscripts Commission
• Date From
  • 2016
• Date To
  • 2025

• Title
  • 1641 Depositions
• Summary
  • The collection of '1641 depositions' in Trinity College Dublin comprises some 3,100 personal statements, in which mainly protestant men and women of all classes told of their experiences at the outbreak of the rebellion by the catholic Irish in 1641. This material, collected by government-appointed commissioners over the course of a decade, runs to approximately 19,000 pages. It was systematically used in the subsequent trials of rebel leaders, and to inform decisions relating to the treatment of catholic landholders under Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate regime. During the early decades of the seventeenth-century Scottish and English planters (who increasingly identified themselves as 'British') colonised the province, often dispossessing the native catholic population. The depositions vividly document these colonial and 'civilizing' processes, which included the spread of Protestantism in one of the remotest regions of the Stuart kingdoms and the introduction of lowland agricultural and commercial practices, together with the native response to these developments. The depositions also constituted the chief evidence for the sharply contested allegation that the 1641 rebellion began with a general massacre of protestant settlers, and as a result they have been central to the most protracted and bitter of Irish historical controversies, which has never been satisfactorily resolved. In fact, the 1641 'massacres', like King William's victory at the Boyne (1690), and the battle of the Somme (1916), have played a key role in creating and sustaining a collective Protestant/British identity in Ulster. This body of material, unparalleled elsewhere in early modern Europe, provides a unique source of information on the 1641 rebellion and for the social, economic, cultural, religious, and political history of seventeenth-century Ireland, England and Scotland. However, it is difficult to read and largely inaccessible to scholars, never mind the general reader. The aim of this project is to transcribe and digitise the '1641 Depositions', creating a unique research tool of interest to both the academic community and the general public. Web site publication would give users full access to all images and transcripts, with free text search, while the construction of a database will facilitate more detailed research projects in a variety of disciplines, and provide an ideal tool for use in the teaching environment. The project will provide material for postgraduate research, enhance the research and publication outputs of the principal applicants, and give valuable training and work experience to four research staff. It will also deliver a working methodology for the transcription and digitisation of manuscript collections, which can be applied to other unique historical collections. There will be a number of other specific outcomes, including an article for a popular journal describing the project, a refereed article for a scholarly journal, a major international conference on 1641, the papers of which will be published in an edited volume, and an exhibition (including a published catalogue) in the TCD Library. By exploiting existing international research networks the project will also address key historiographical debates, as well as cross-border issues of identity in Ireland. Preliminary discussions have also revealed a wide level of interdisciplinary interest from literature, linguistics, gender studies, anthropology and historical geography. This project is part of a joint initiative, involving the University of Aberdeen, Trinity College, Dublin and Cambridge University, which will develop existing institutional links between all three. I successfully applied for £426,000 from the AHRC Resource Enhancement Scheme, while Professor Jane Ohlmeyer obtained €250,000 from the IRCHSS. TCD has also committed funds to this project, bringing the total funding to over €1,000,000.
• Funding Agency
  • AHRC; IRCHSS; TCD €1 million in total
• Date From
  • 1 October 2007
• Date To
  • September 2025

• Title
  • Oliver Cromwell: Letters and Papers
• Summary
  • Oxford University Press has invited a handful of leading early modern scholars to produce a new three-volume edition of Oliver Cromwell's letters and papers, the first since W.C Abbott's four volume work published in the 1930s. Abbott's edition is very problematic, as is the three-volume edition produced by Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s. Significant numbers of letters and papers are omitted from both editions, neither of which is fully annotated. Moreover, significant advances in historical scholarship over the past 70 years need to be incorporated as commentary into a new critical edition. I am the only Irish scholar invited to partake in this prestigious project. As a first step in this process, we have employed three post-doctoral researchers for two years to locate, digitise and transcribe all the printed and manuscript material in the Irish and English archives. OUP intend to produce the edition online and in hard copy in 2014..
• Funding Agency
  • IRCHSS; AHRC; British Academy; Leverhulme; TCD Start-Up Fund
• Date From
  • Oct 2008
• Date To
  • Nov 2022

• Title
  • CULTURA
• Summary
  • The key to realising true innovation in humanities research over the next decade is by supporting comprehensive programs of knowledge transfer between scholars in the humanities, innovative technology developers and ICT researchers. This project proposes critical knowledge transfer between internationally renowned universities (TCD and the University of Sofia) and world leading industry partners (IBM). More specifically the CULTURA project proposes a knowledge transfer programme that exchanges key technology know-how in content analysis and management with the academic community to enable the development and support of research methods and practices for the next generation. The specific intersectoral project aims are: 1. To support the transfer of knowledge needed for the next generation of humanities research processes and practices through sharing, exchanging and enhancing currently disconnected expertise in the areas of historical research, digital archives, natural language processing, data mining, semantic searching, machine learning, discourse and social network analysis. 2. Through the knowledge transfer activities and programme, enable the development of an innovative Web environment to support these research practices in the humanities. 3. To validate the knowledge exchange by applying these enhanced research processes and practices to a variety of research topics (and associated content repositories) in the humanities. 4. To provide access to this unique integration and enhancement of content technologies, Web based collaborative research environments, innovative adaptive information retrieval and adaptive presentation technologies, to enable digital humanities research in new areas. From the perspective of the humanities/history this sort of intersectoral exchange of knowledge and expertise with technology companies is unique and will enable scholars to ask questions that hitherto were regarded as unanswerable or simply too labour intensive to justify even attempting. In addition, CULTURA will help to transform attitudes and lead to new commercial partnerships. Partners include the Universities of Sofia, Padua and Graz as well as IBM.
• Funding Agency
  • FP7
• Date From
  • Jan 2011
• Date To
  • Dec 2014

• Title
  • The Down Survey of Ireland
• Summary
  • This project will create a consolidated digital atlas of the 1650s Down Survey of Ireland by overlaying all extant Down Survey maps and related cartographic material onto an Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 base. A catalogue of the surviving manuscripts will accompany the atlas. The project will create a geo-referenced Townland Index and an historical Geographic Information System (GIS). When combined, these can be used to consolidate a wide range of 17th-century source material. By applying spatial analysis tools to digitised historical text-based documents, such as the 1641 Depositions, this project will also support location-based analysis of people and events using contemporary geographic models. In September 2011 the project received €117,000 funding from the IRCHSS, which in addition to my work as PI will fund the employment of a Research Assistant for 15 months and a Computer Science Post-doctoral fellow for 6 months.
• Funding Agency
  • IRCHSS
• Date From
  • October 2011
• Date To
  • April 2013

• Title
  • Fagel Map Collection
• Summary
  • Creating a digital resource from the geographical content of the Fagel Library: The Fagel Library, acquired by the College in 1803, contains within it one of the finest collections of maps and atlases from the period 1600-1800 anywhere in the world. The collection is peerless in terms of the state of preservation of this material, and is truly comprehensive in scope. The collection includes some 2,800 large format individual map sheets, 80 large format atlases of which many are beautifully coloured containing 7,000 maps and a further 3,000 items of a cartographical nature contained in a collection of 700 travel books and journals. The maps sheets and the majority of atlases have been digitized to a high resolution at full scale, and a database has been created for both. The purpose of this project is to define how these resources can now be exploited as research tools and as gateways to collaboration with third party institutions. Stage 1 of the project involves the creation by the summer of 2015 of an interactive website, showcasing the treasures of the Fagel map collection. This stage is being funded by a philanthropic grant of €161,396. The creation of a consortium for a major Horizon 20/20 bid in 2015 is being funded by the Irish Research Council New Foundations Scheme and the Trinity Long Room Hub Research Incentive Scheme.
• Funding Agency
  • Irish Research Council; Faculty Strategic Funds; Trinity Long Room Hub; Philanthropic Funds
• Date From
  • March 2013
• Date To
  • 2015

• Title
  • 400th Anniversary of the Ulster Plantation
• Summary
  • 2008 - 2010 marks the 400th anniversary of the plantation of Ulster. The plantation of Ulster signalled the end of the old Gaelic order in Ireland, and radically altered the political and cultural landscape of the northern province, giving rise to many of the structures, identities and cultures that underpin Irish society today. At this time, we have an opportunity to mark this seminal event in Irish history in the context of renewed peace and cooperation on our island. In marking the anniversary of the plantations in Ireland, we can foster strong cross border links that celebrate both the unique cultural diversities of all Ireland and Northern Ireland by focusing on the events that underpinned, and were central to, Ireland's history for the last 400 years. We propose to mark the anniversary through a series of three major international conferences held in 2009 - London (June); Derry (July); TCD (Oct) in collaboration with Goldsmith College (London) and the University of Ulster. Funding has been obtained from the IRCHSS, AHRC and British Academy. Two volumes, based on the proceedings, will be published by Manchester University Press in 2011.
• Funding Agency
  • IRCHSS; AHRC; British Academy
• Date From
  • 2008
• Date To
  • 2012

• Title
  • New technology and the Humanities
• Summary
  • This project aims to modify cutting-edge IBM software, creating a shared editing environment and a customised set of data rules and libraries for the 1641 depositions. This will enable (a) accelerated and machine driven Text Encoding Initiative [TEI] mark-up of the transcriptions; (b) collaborative transcription and capture of the collective knowledge transfer process; (c) exploration of how existing structured datasets (e.g. the TCD military migration or the Irish statute staple datasets) might be made interoperable with the unstructured 1641 transcripts. The project, therefore, will apply state of the art technological developments and software in an innovative way and, for the first time ever, to a major humanities project, as well as develop a meaningful R&D relationship with IBM, world leaders in the area.
• Funding Agency
  • TCD Long Room Hub
• Date From
  • 1 April 2008
• Date To
  • 30 Sept 2008

• Title
  • Citizens and soldiers in early modern Europe
• Summary
  • The intention is to establish an international network of scholars to examine the relationship between civilians and the military in early modern Europe, with a particular emphasis on the three Stuart kingdoms - Ireland, England and Scotland. I was a successful co-applicant in 2006 with Dr Phil Withington of Leeds University and Dr Andrew Mackillop of Aberdeen for a small research grant of £7,500 from the British Academy, to hold a number of exploratory workshops and conferences, as well as developing an international academic network of colleagues in Europe, North America and Australia. The first (hugely successful) conference was held in Leeds in December 2006, with a second one scheduled for 2009, after which we intend to apply for a major grant to develop the project. The Journal of Early Modern History has just agreed to devote a special issue to a collection of essays prepared by members of the network.
• Funding Agency
  • British Academy
• Date From
  • 2006
• Date To
  • 2011

• Title
  • Commentarius Rinuccinianus
• Summary
  • I am chair the editorial board of the Commentarius Rinuccinianus project, which is based in the University of Ulster and funded by the Irish government. Over twenty translators have been working for three years on translating the six volumes of the Commentarius, one of the most important historical sources of seventeenth-century Ireland, from Latin into English. The Commentarius provides a continuous narrative on the wars in Ireland during the 1640s, focusing in particular on the mission to Ireland of the papal nuncio, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, as well as copies of original documents, many of them long since lost. The translations, plus the original Latin text, will be digitised and made available online early from 2010. The Irish Manuscript Commission will also publish the entire translation in five volumes.
• Funding Agency
  • Irish Government
• Date From
  • 2004
• Date To
  • 2015