Brian O Raghallaigh

Irish and Scottish Gaelic folklore will be decoded by DCU and the University of Edinburgh in a new project announced today by the Irish Research Council

Ireland and UK expand cooperation with joint research awards in digital humanities

Minister Simon Harris welcomes €6.5m boost for interdisciplinary research partnerships.

Eleven new research projects have been announced today by the Irish Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), that will see the UK and Ireland bring together world-leading expertise in the Digital Humanities.

Decoding Hidden Heritages in Gaelic Traditional Narrative with Text-Mining and Phylogenetics by Dr Brian Ó Raghallaigh, DCU and Dr William Lamb, University of Edinburgh, is one of two DCU projects to receive funding under a unique cooperation between Ireland and the UK announcing joint research awards in digital humanities today.

Minister Simon Harris welcomed the €6.5m boost for 11 interdisciplinary research partnerships announced today by the Irish Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as part of a partnership which will see Ireland and the UK bring together world-leading expertise in the digital humanities.

Digital innovations and community engagement

Digital humanities projects use digital methods and computational techniques as part of the research methodology. The projects will aim to develop new research techniques, bring innovative approaches to community engagement, and enhance cultural understanding and access to heritage. 

Commenting on the award, Dr Brian Ó Raghallaigh from Fiontar & Scoil na Gailge said: "This research will concentrate upon International Folktales (e.g. The Gifts of the Little People) in Irish and Scottish Gaelic and use them as a vehicle for understanding early communication networks between Ireland and Scotland. This will provide us with a novel understanding of the joint cultural history of these two countries. The project will build on the work of the Dúchas project to digitise the National Folklore Collection of Ireland."

Decoding hidden Gaelic heritage

The project aims to fuse deep, qualitative analysis with cutting-edge computational methods to decode, interpret and curate the hidden heritages of Gaelic traditional narrative. Using recent advances in language technology, the project will digitise, convert and make available a vast collection of folklore manuscripts in Irish and Scottish Gaelic. In turn, this new digital resource will catalyse ongoing research into Gaelic speech technology. The project will examine International Tales in Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Through an approach known as text-mining, it will use artificial intelligence to search the tales for similar topics, phrase sand other linguistic patterns. 

Transforming the understanding of Gaelic oral culture

This work will transform the understanding about Gaelic oral culture and disseminate unique archival material online to a diverse set of end-users. It will positively impact the sustainability of Gaelic-speaking communities through the creation and further stimulation of important language technologies including handwriting recognition, machine translation and automatic speech recognition.

Building on the UK-Ireland collaboration

The Research Grants call is part of the Fund for International Collaboration, a multi-million-pound fund supporting international collaborations which enhances the UK’s ability to build new, and strengthen existing, partnerships with global research and innovation leaders.

More DCU awards in digital humanities

Dr Gary Sinclair from DCU Business School and Dr Mark Doidge, University of Brighton also received an award today for their project - Tackling Online Hate in Football. Read more here