November 2015 Galway Launch of Letters of 1916

The Letters of 1916, in collaboration with NUI Galway, is bringing its ‘Letters of 1916: A Year in the Life’ event to The James Hardiman Library’s Digital Archives and the Moore Institute at NUI Galway on Monday, 16 November. Visitors are welcome to drop-in at any stage during the event from 2pm-6pm.

Professor Susan Schreibman of Digital Humanities at Maynooth University and Letters of 1916 is inviting the people of Galway to take part in this public event where original letters from 1916 will be uploaded to the internet and made available as part of a new national digital archive. Members of the public are invited to bring family letters along to digitise and to participate in uploading rare materials collected, and to learn how the process works.

Letters of 1916 is Ireland’s first public humanities project. It is creating a crowdsourced digital collection of letters written between 1 November 1915 and 31 October 1916. To date the project has collected over 2,300 letters from over 20 institutions and 40 private collections. These letters cover a variety of topics ranging from the Easter Rising to art, culture, family life and the Great War.

Professor Daniel Carey, Director of the Moore Institute at NUI Galway, said: “Through these letters the project is bringing to life the written words, the last words, the unspoken words and the forgotten words. It is creating an online collection for the public, created by the public, which is adding a new perspective to life in this period, a confidential glimpse into early 20th century Ireland and the politics of the era.”

The ‘Letters of 1916: A Year in the Life’ series of events is bringing digital humanities to the general public and into secondary schools in locations around Ireland. During the event, run in conjunction with Science Foundation Ireland, visitors will transcribe and add letters from archives around the country to the Letters of 1916 collection and by doing so, will gain insight into what life was like a century ago.

The Letters of 1916 project team will provide a hands-on workshop from the Nursing and Midwifery PC suite of the James Hardiman Library at NUI Galway.

This will be followed by refreshments in room G010 of the James Hardiman Research building and a series of short talks by Professor Susan Schreibman, and Dr Sarah­Anne Buckley, Dr Conor McNamara and Thérèse McIntyre from NUI Galway, based on letters from Galway, illuminating both everyday life as well as how individuals dealt with momentous events of the period.

For further information on Letters of 1916 visit: http://dh.tcd.ie/letters1916/

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