The Letters of 1916: Editing as UnRemembering

Ireland is currently in the opening years of what has been billed The Decade of Centenaries, or The Decade of Commemoration. This decade, from 1912-1922, marks a violent and disruptive period, politically, socially, and creatively, cumulating in Irish independence from the United Kingdom, followed by a bloody Civil War. 1916 is seen as a turning point in Irish politics: not only were many thousands of Irish fighting in the Great War with the British army, many at home took up arms against that army during the Easter Rising. The Letters of 1916 is a crowd-sourced digital humanities project that is creating ‘a year in the life’ of Ireland, as well as how Ireland was perceived abroad, by collecting letters – any letter—about Ireland. This talk will explore the methods and politics of creating such as collection which is being positioned technically at the intersections of digital scholarly editing and big data.

(Source: ELD 2015)

+ info: http://dh.tcd.ie/letters1916/