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Cuala Press Project
The Cuala Press Project is a collaborative research and digital project between Virtual Trinity Library, the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and the Centre of the Book. It is generously funded by the Schooner Foundation. Distinguished by its use of fine materials, creativity and craftspersonship, Cuala Press, a female enterprise, was unique in its ambitions to revive and sustain the art of hand-printing in Ireland in the twentieth century. Created for a local and international readership, the visual and textual productions at the Cuala Press provide insights into the construction and presentation of a distinctive and sophisticated form of Irish cultural identity. A selection of over 100 Cuala Press hand printed images and other archival materials are now available at Digital Collections, The Library of Trinity College Dublin.
Early Irish Hands: The Development of Writing in Early Ireland
Much is still unclear about the early development of Irish script and associated writing techniques. Nicole Volmering’s SFI-IRC Pathway Programme funded The Early Irish Hands project investigates the origins of this crucial part of Irish cultural heritage. By collecting evidence from the over 130 early Irish manuscripts that survive, the project aims to create a detailed picture of the formation of medieval Irish intellectual culture and book making practices. In addition, this project will create new resources for researchers as well as tools to make Irish script more accessible to teachers of Irish history and to the general public.
Manuscripts for Medieval Studies
This project, part of the Virtual Trinity Library Programme, generously supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York and led by the Library, with Estelle Gittins as curatorial lead, seeks to catalogue, conserve, digitise, research and share a selection of highly significant medieval manuscripts. Completed manuscripts include masterpieces of medieval art such as Matthew Paris’s Book of St Albans and the twelfth-century West Dereham Bible.
Medieval Big Data
Philology, ‘the science of written texts’, is a key component of book history. Mark Faulkner’s Medieval Big Data, funded by a Provost’s PhD Award (2020-2024), explores how corpus and computational linguistics offers a way to move beyond some of the weaknesses of traditional philology, especially its reliance on very small, laboriously curated datasets. Recent publications include ‘Habemus Corpora: Reapproaching Philology in the Age of Big Data’ (2021) and ‘Corpus Philology, Big Dating and Bottom-Up Periodisation’ (2023).
Searobend: Linked Metadata for English Language Texts, 1000-1300
Searobend: Linked Metadata for English Language Texts, 1000-1300, is a two-year project (2022-2024) funded by the Irish Research Council’s Coalesce Scheme (PI: Mark Faulkner; Co-PI: Declan O’Sullivan). It uses linked data technologies to establish, on the basis of existing print and digital resources, authoritative metadata about the production and transmission of texts written in English across a three-century period. To do so, it develops an ontology for works (the words authors wrote), texts (how scribes transmitted them), manuscripts and scribes, that it is hoped can be applied to English-language works from different periods, non-manuscript works (e. g. inscriptions on stone or metal) and works in other languages. The metadata it makes available will be foundational for the next generation of work on English literary and linguistic history.
Amra
Amra, led by Ann Buckley, surveys the surviving corpus of Latin chant sung on the feastdays Irish saints in Ireland, Britain and continental Europe, on the basis of medieval liturgical manuscripts used or produced in Ireland. A key focus of the Amra project is the reconstruction of musical texts and publication of editions and recordings.
Fagel Project
The Fagel Collection at the Library of Trinity College Dublin is one of the most important and largest still extant Dutch private libraries from the eighteenth century. The library was assembled as a working library by several generations of the Fagel family, of whom successive members held high offices in the Dutch Republic throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The entire collection of books, pamphlets and maps was purchased for Trinity College Dublin in 1802. To improve access to the collection, the Library of Trinity College Dublin and the KB National Library of the Netherlands are collaborating to catalogue all of its printed books and pamphlets, under the leadership of Ann-Marie Hansen, with significant impact.
The Irish Foundations of Carolingian Europe: the case of calendrical science
Immo Warntjes’ project, funded by the Irish Research Council's Laureate scheme, aims at contributing to our understanding of the role played by peripheral regions, especially Ireland and Spain, in the intellectual formation of Europe during the so-called Carolingian Renaissance (c. 750-900). The focus is, first and foremost, on Ireland, but also on Visigothic Spain. The monastic discipline of computus is ideal for this purpose. Methodologically, this project operates on two levels: 1) edition and translation of key texts, to identify distinctive regional symptoms; 2) a systematic analysis of the c. 400 computistical manuscripts pre-900, to trace these symptoms.
The Virtual Treasury Record of Ireland
The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, led by Peter Crooks, Ciarán Wallace and David Brown, is an all-island and international legacy for the Decade of Centenaries.
The Treasury re-imagines and reconstructs through digital technologies the Public Record Office of Ireland, a magnificent archive destroyed on June 30th, 1922, in the opening engagement of the Civil War. Together with our partners across Ireland and around the world, we are democratizing access to invaluable records and illuminating seven centuries of Irish history. The research programme hosted at Trinity College Dublin brings together expertise in many disciplines including manuscripts and book history, digital editing, conservation and artificial intelligence.