Information Technology and the Humanities: The Experience of the Irish in Europe Project

Irish in Europe Project
As a result of its leadership role within the fi eld of early
modern migration studies, the Irish in Europe Project, founded
in NUI Maynooth in 1997, is now the custodian of a rich and
constantly expanding corpus of biographical data on Irish
migrants in early modern Europe. The most substantial data
sets relate to Irish students in the universities of Paris and
Toulouse in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Irish
patients in Parisian hospitals in the early eighteenth-century,
Irish students in Leuven University; Irish students in France’s
leading medical faculties, and Irish regiments in eighteenthcentury
France and Spain.
In line with the Project’s mission to make this data accessible
to researchers, teachers and students and to ensure that
the material is rendered responsive to the full range of
users needs, the Irish in Europe Project undertook the
development of an electronic research environment for the
collection, management and querying of biographical data
on Irish migrants in early modern Europe. This was facilitate
by the award of a Government of Ireland Research Project
Grant in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2006, which
accelerated progress in reaching four target objectives, namely
to encode these databases in extensible Mark up language
(XML), to provide internet based access to the databases, to
establish a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to facilitate
research and teaching, and lastly, to manage and promote the
adoption of best practice for biographical databases. In this
encoded format, the data is rendered susceptible to a broad
range of queries and manipulations, permitting, for instance,
the automatic generation of graphics, maps, tables etc. This
project will be rolled out in 2007-9. In July-November 2007
important progress was made on the project in the context
of the preparing a database Kiosk for the National Library of
Ireland exhibition ‘Strangers to Citizens: the Irish in Europe,
1600-1800’ which opened in December 2007.
Kiosk Development
The Kiosk is essentially user-friendly software providing access
to research derived from four different biographical studies of
migration in the Early Modern period, i.e. student migration to
France (Brockliss and Ferté, 1987; Brockliss and Ferté, 2004),
student migration to Louvain (Nilis, 2006), military migration
to France (Ó Conaill, 2005) and military migration to Spain
(Morales, 2002; Morales, 2003; Morales, 2007). Data from
the associated databases were provided in Microsoft Excel
format or extracted using custom developed programs, from
Microsoft Word versions and Portable Document Format
(PDF) versions of the research papers. XML data models,
similar to those previously described by Keating et al. (2004)
were used to encode the four data sets. Each dataset contained
information pertinent to the profession under study, and
there was some overlap, particularly related to personal data.
In general, student data were associated with migration from
dioceses whereas military migration data were associated with
counties. Central to the software requirements of this project
was the specifi cation that common software tools should
be used to visualize differing data sets whenever possible
for (i) usability issues and (ii) providing comparative analyses
functionality which has never been available to Early Modern
migration researchers, for example, see Figure 1.
The project team designed and developed two distinct
and fundamental “database inspectors” essential for data
visualization: (i) an interactive vector-based “heat-map” of
Ireland which provides scaled diocese or county density
migration patterns for a variety of inputs selected by the
user, and (ii) an interactive record inspector which provides
key record information based on exact, partial or phonetic
searching of individual surnames and other personal features.
The database inspectors were developed using Macromedia
Flex and have been tested in a variety of modern browsers.
Converted datasets reside on the Irish in Europe web
server (http://www.irishineurope.ie) and are accessed using
optimized searching software implemented as web services.
Database inspectors communicate with the web services
using CGI (outward); the latter return XML which describe
how the maps or record inspectors should be drawn – the
drawing functions are all implemented using Macromedia Flex
and Flash, as shown in Figure 2.
The Kiosk, essentially hosting a virtual exhibition, was
custom developed (using Objective C) within the project
using Internet browser tools provided as part of the XCode
and Safari development suite. The current version provides
accessibility options including user selected zoom and pan,
and an audio soundtrack for each virtual exhibition page. The
complete system is available for operation in Kiosk mode or
can be accessed online. Overall, this project was completed
in 28 person months and required a wide range of software
development and information architecture skills not possessed
by a single individual. We propose to present the lessons
learned from the management of the project and development
process, in addition to those described below. Lessons learned from Collaboration
The collaborative exercise involved in the production of NLI/
Irish in Europe Biographical Databases Kiosk yielded three
critical results:
Firstly, the exercise revealed that the software architecture
of the Kiosk had to refl ect both the nature and form of the
historical data used and the specifi cations of the clients. It
was the practical interaction between the data collectors/
interpreters and the information technology experts that
shaped the architecture of the Kiosk. These functions can not
and ought not be compartmentalized and, in project of this
nature, should not be hermetically sealed off from each other.
Secondly, the solution of technical and software engineering
diffi culties and challenges in the project involved not only
increasingly defi ned specifi cations from the data collectors
and the NLI clients but also critical input from the software
engineering and technical teams. For instance, important
inconsistencies in the raw information came to light thanks to
the interrogations of the software and technical teams, who
had tested the data. This led to a feedback, which permitted
the creation of a practical working relationship between
the humanities team, the software and technical teams and
the clients. It is highly suggestive for the development of
architectures for humanities-software-client-user relations in
the future.
Thirdly, the expansion in the range of functions provided by the
site was driven by the dynamic interface between the software/
technical teams and the information. While it is usual for the
architecture of similar sites to be dictated by purely technical
criteria or costing issues, this project revealed the possibility
for creative input from the technical-raw data interface. It is
rare for technical teams to be afforded this level of access to
the data collection and interpretation/presentation.
References
Brockliss, L.W.B. and Patrick Ferté, P. (1987) Irish clerics
in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a
statistical survey. Proceedings of the Royal Irish academy , 87 C,
pp. 527-72.
Brockliss, L.W.B. and Patrick Ferté, P. (2004). Prosopography
of Irish clerics in the universities of Paris and Toulouse, 1573-
1792. Archivium Hibernicum, lviii, pp. 7-166.
Hernan, E. G. and Morales, O. R. (2007). Essays on the Irish
military presence in early modern Spain, 1580-1818, Eds. Madrid,
Ministerio de Defensa.
Keating, J. G., Clancy, D., O’Connor, T. and Lyons, M. A. (2004)
Problems with databases and the XML solution. Archvium
Hibernicum, lviii, pp. 268-75.
Morales, O. R. (2002) El socorro de Irlanda en 1601, Madrid.
Morales, O. R. (2003) España y la pérdida del Ulster, Madrid.
Morales, O. R. (2007). The Irish military presence in the Spanish
Armies, 1580-1818. Madrid, Ministerio de Defensa.
Nilis, J. (2006). Irish students at Leuven University, 1548-1797’.
Archivium Hibernicum, lx, pp. 1-304.
Ó Conaill, C. (2005) ‘“Ruddy cheeks and strapping thighs”:
an analysis of the ordinary soldiers in the ranks of the Irish
regiments of eighteenth-century France’ in The Irish Sword,
xxiv (2005/5), pp 411-27.
Figure 1: Extract from “Strangers to Citizens”
Kiosk’s Database Landing page
Figure 2: Extract from “Strangers to Citizens” Kiosk’s
Student Migration Comparison page showing two
Database Inspectors (Diocese Density Maps)