Keynote abstract

In 1922, the ‘Record Treasury’ of the Public Record Office of Ireland in Dublin was destroyed in the opening engagement of Ireland’s Civil War. The Treasury contained millions of historical documents filling 100,000 square feet of shelving organised into 5,500 series of records accumulated over seven centuries. It was destroyed in one afternoon.

Beyond 2022 is an international collaborative research project based at the ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, and funded by the Government of Ireland. We are working to create a virtual reimagining of this lost national archive. Many millions of words from destroyed documents will be linked and reassembled from copies, transcripts and other records scattered among the collections of our archival partners. We will bring together this rich array of replacement items within an immersive 3-D reconstruction of the destroyed building.

In this keynote address, we will discuss the Digital Humanities and Knowledge Engineering challenges presented by the project, and also reflect on how this reimagining of a lost archive will provide deeper search and discoverability than was possible one hundred years ago when the archive was still in existence.

Speaker biographies

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Peter Crooks

Associate Professor / Senior Lecturer in Medieval History Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Crooks is the Founding Director of Beyond 2022: Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury, an all-island and international collaboration to create a virtual reality reconstruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland, and its collections, which were destroyed at the outbreak of the Irish Civil War in 1922. He is also the Academic Coordinator of the Trinity Long Room Hub’s Multiannual Lecture Series entitled, ‘Out of the Ashes: Collective Memory, Cultural Loss and Recovery’ (2018 to 2021).

Figure 1: Peter Crooks (top) and Gary Munnelly (bottom)

Crooks’ primary research interest is in Ireland in the period 1171-1541 and, arising from that, in the wider ‘English world’ or ‘Plantagenet empire’ of which Ireland formed an integral part. He has published widely on Irish and British medieval Irish history and have been commissioned to serve as editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Britain, vol. 2: 1100–1500. Before returning to Trinity in 2013, he was a Past and Present Society Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and a Lecturer in Late Medieval History at the University of East Anglia.

Dr. Gary Munnelly

Technical Lead, Beyond 2022 – Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Gary is a research engineer working on Beyond 2022. He completed his PhD in Computer Science in 2019 under the supervision of Prof. Séamus Lawless. His thesis focused on entity linking for text-based cultural heritage collections. He is primarily interested in modelling and structuring cultural heritage information so that computers can better support humanities researchers at all levels of expertise. This includes research into linked data, and information extraction. Within Beyond 2022 he is currently focused on developing tools and methods to support historians in reconstructing the archive. In addition to his work on Beyond 2022, Gary is also involved in Provenance, an EU funded project which aims to identify and label instances of fake news online.