Scholarly Editing at the Middle Distance

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 recovering this period by creating ‘a year in the life’ of Ireland through the personal letters of many thousands of Irish people, as well as those interested in Ireland, at home and abroad.

Letters are being collected from institutions globally, as well as from individuals. Creating such a collection, linking items that have been distributed physically over time, fulfils one of the early promises of the World Wide Web. This talk will thus explore the methods, technologies, management, and politics of creating such as collection which is being positioned at the intersections of digital scholarly editing and big data.