VOICES Blog: Issue One

Welcome to the first in the VOICES blog series and to our VOICES video! 

We are delighted to have completed the first year in the VOICES project. Even after just one year, we can see the impact of combining pioneering digital approaches with historical scholarship to recover the marginalised voices of women hidden in the ever-growing ‘digital windfall’ of historical documents. 

We began our collaboration as a team one year ago with a trip to Oxford to meet with the team from the Civil War petitions project. This was followed in November 2023, by the launch by Taoiseach Simon Harris of Making Empire: Ireland, imperialism, & the early modern world (Oxford University Press).  Chapter 3 (on women and assimilation) is the starting point for VOICES. 

In the meantime, our research has been progressing at pace. In April, we held a workshop which brought together leading historians, literary scholars, data analysts, and computer scientists to discuss our primary sources and how we can use innovative technologies such as Transkribus and generative AI for historical analysis. 

Much of our focus has been existing digitised data, especially the 1641 Depositions, the records of the Statute Staple and other sources available thanks to the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland. Research fellow Dr. Bronagh McShane is focusing on the wills, testamentary materials and funeral entries and Dr. Daniel Patterson is working on the Court of Chancery records to capture and/or digitise all of the women heretofore hidden from us. The extracted data will be uploaded to the Knowledge Graph by our Computer Science team led by Professor Declan O’Sullivan and Dr. Lucy McKenna. 

The project has seen some attention with both academic and mainstream media coverage, and the project team is reporting early results at conferences such as the recent Tudor Ireland Conference and ENCHOS in Cambridge. Most recently, we are offering an MPhil module on ‘The Lived Experiences of Women in Early Modern Ireland’. 

The VOICES Team collaborates closely with Dr. Peter Crooks and the VRTI team as we both follow similar paths in the use of AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Knowledge Graph technologies to analyse and present our source materials. 

We are excited for the year ahead and will continue to deliver groundbreaking advances in using AI, together with NLP, to transform how we can access and interrogate previously inaccessible information on these non-elite women in early modern Ireland and recover their voices and experiences during this transformative period. 

Do follow along and sign up for our forthcoming Newsletter. 

Professor Jane Ohlmeyer 

VOICES Principal Investigator