Projects

Current projects affiliated with the DHRC

The following projects provide focal points for current work in the Galway DH community.

Armarium Digital Editions

Project Developer: Prof. Pádraic Moran
https://armarium.universityofgalway.ie/

Armarium is an Open Access, Open Source publishing platform for scholarly digital editions. It emphasises simple technical implementation, long-term preservation, citability, readability, and quality assurance. 

Capturing Blades: Documenting Medieval Combat Technique through Motion Capture Technologies

Principal Investigator: Dr Jacopo Bisagni

Capturing Blades is a pilot project that uses motion-capture technology to record and analyse techniques from I.33, the earliest European swordsmanship manual (c.1330). Working with expert historical fencers and relying on infrastructure and expertise available at the Centre for Creative Technologies, we will capture selected combat sequences and produce analysable data and animated visualisations. This proof-of-concept dataset will form the foundation for a wider programme on the interaction between Medieval Latin philology and embodied research.

Funded by SRIS 2025-6 (College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Celtic Studies).

DICUIL: Dicuil – an Irish and Carolingian Universalist and his Intellectual Legacy

Principal Investigator: Dr Christian Schweizer
https://www.universityofgalway.ie/classics/research/postdocs/schweizer/

This project analyses the texts and the legacy of Dicuil, an Irish scholar working at the Carolingian court in the early ninth century. This includes first translations of three of his texts, and a first edition of his 'Epistula censuum', a partly poetic treatise on measurements and grammar, written for Louis the Pious in 818. This text has been made available as the first contribution to Galway's pioneering new Open Access platform Armarium Digital Editions: https://armarium.universityofgalway.ie/editions/dicuil-epistula/

GLOSSAM: Global and Local Scholarship on Annotated Manuscripts

Principal Investigator: Prof. Pádraic Moran
https://www.glossam.ie/

The GLOSSAM project will enhance our understanding of reading, education, scholarship, and knowledge transfer in the pre-modern world, by creating new narratives, conceptual frameworks, digital tools and methodological models for the study of glosses. Glosses are the paratexts transmitted between the lines and in the margins of manuscript books, micro-texts that control how the central texts were read and interpreted. 

MIrA: Manuscripts with Irish Associations

Principal Investigator: Prof. Pádraic Moran
https://www.mira.ie

MIrA is a digital catalogue that aims to provide useful information for researchers on early Irish manuscript culture before c. AD 1000. 

PIETRA

Principal Investigator: Prof. Anne O'Connor
https://pietra.universityofgalway.ie/

PIETRA is funded by the European Research Council under its Consolidator Grant Scheme, Grant No. 101001478. It is a study of the foundations on which the Catholic Church builds its multilingual communicative structures, and is the first, large-scale, multilingual study of the translation products and processes that underpin communication in global religion.

REBPAF: Re-mediating the Early Book: Pasts and Futures 

Principal Investigators: Dr Lindsay Reid, Dr Catherine Emerson
https://www.universityofgalway.ie/rebpaf/

REBPAF focuses on the ways in which 15th- and 16th-century book producers (scribes, printers, entrepreneurs) negotiated the dynamic relations between the manuscript book and the printed book and adapted to the evolving challenges of the market, and it demonstrates the continuing relevance of these cultural and economic negotiations to the modern world. To this end, REBPAF unites the interests of present-day organisations that re-mediate the early book (e.g. publishers, book dealers, museums, and other stakeholders in the creative and heritage sectors) with those of academic scholarship.

Funded by the European Union under the Horizon Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Actions 2021 Project number 101072698. This work is additionally supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract number 22.00196 and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475-1700

Principal Investigator: Prof. Erin A. McCarthy
https://stemma.universityofgalway.ie/

The STEMMA project develops and applies a data-driven approach in order to provide the first macro-level view of the circulation of early modern English poetry in manuscript. It focuses on English verse manuscripts written and used between the introduction of printing in England in 1475 and 1700, by which time the rapid changes in both literary taste and publishing norms ushered in by the Restoration had fully transformed literary culture. The project includes manuscripts circulating in England and anywhere else English was spoken and read, including Ireland, the North American colonies, and continental exile communities.

Theatronomics

Principal Investigator: Prof. David O'Shaughnessy
https://www.theatronomics.com/

The ambition of Theatronomics is to harness the remarkably rich (if patchy and inconsistent) financial archives of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, 1732–1809. By fusing archival research, digital humanities, and econometrics, this interdisciplinary project will construct a foundation on which eighteenth-century theatre studies can build its next generation of scholarship. 

Completed projects

RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550-1700

Principal Investigator: Prof. Marie-Louise Coolahan
https://recirc.universityofgalway.ie/

RECIRC was a research project about the impact made by women writers and their works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Led by Marie-Louise Coolahan, and funded by the European Research Council from 2014 to 2020, the project involved a team of 11 researchers based at the National University of Ireland Galway. The focus included writers who were read in Ireland and Britain as well as women born and resident in Anglophone countries. Therefore, the subject of study was not limited to authors who wrote in English. RECIRC aimed to produce a large-scale, quantitative analysis of the reception and circulation of women's writing from 1550 to 1700. The RECIRC database is one of its major outputs.