Seven centuries of Irish archives painstakingly recreated.
May 22, 2022 9:50:39 GMT
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Post by John Green on May 22, 2022 9:50:39 GMT
Digital wizardry and academic sleuthing have helped recreate a cultural treasure severely damaged in the conflict in 1922.
Now, on the eve of the disaster’s centenary, a virtual reconstruction of the building and its archives is to be unveiled. Historians, archivists and computer scientists have spent five years piecing together much of what had been thought lost for ever.
“When we began the project, the story was that everything had been lost. But it turns out we have been able to recover hundreds of thousands of documents,” said Peter Crooks, director of Beyond 2022: Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland. “We could not have known the scale of the materials that were out there.”
One strand focused on tens of thousands of “salved” documents – about a twentieth of the archive that survived the flames and had been packed away in boxes. “You could smell the ash when you opened some of them,” said Wallace. Computers were used to decipher centuries-old handwriting, facilitating digitisation.
Another strand saw historians embedded in foreign archives with Irish material to trawl for duplicates and copies of lost documents. They found hundreds of thousands. www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/22/irish-public-record-office-civil-war-bombardment-archives-reborn
Now, on the eve of the disaster’s centenary, a virtual reconstruction of the building and its archives is to be unveiled. Historians, archivists and computer scientists have spent five years piecing together much of what had been thought lost for ever.
“When we began the project, the story was that everything had been lost. But it turns out we have been able to recover hundreds of thousands of documents,” said Peter Crooks, director of Beyond 2022: Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland. “We could not have known the scale of the materials that were out there.”
One strand focused on tens of thousands of “salved” documents – about a twentieth of the archive that survived the flames and had been packed away in boxes. “You could smell the ash when you opened some of them,” said Wallace. Computers were used to decipher centuries-old handwriting, facilitating digitisation.
Another strand saw historians embedded in foreign archives with Irish material to trawl for duplicates and copies of lost documents. They found hundreds of thousands. www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/22/irish-public-record-office-civil-war-bombardment-archives-reborn