The Two Significant Digital Cultural resources
To validate the environment which will be developed by CULTURA, two major artefacts have been selected:
- The 1641 Depositions, held in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
- The IPSA Digital Herbal Archive, held in the University of Padua, Italy.
These resources, and the communities of users who work with them, contribute to the design, development and evaluation of the innovative research environment created.
The 1641 Depositions
The 1641 Depositions are seventeenth-century manuscripts that comprise depositions or witness statements, examinations and associated materials in which Protestant men and women of all classes and from all over Ireland told of their experiences following the outbreak of the rebellion by the Catholic Irish in October 1641. This body of material is unparalleled anywhere else in early modern Europe and provides a unique source of information for the causes and events surrounding the 1641 rebellion and for the social, economic, cultural, religious, and political history of seventeenth-century Ireland, England and Scotland.
The 1641 Depositions have been digitised and transcribed and can be used to validate the techniques proposed by CULTURA.
From a technological perspective, the 1641 Depositions represent a textually-rich digital humanities collection, which is characterised by noisy text, inconsistent sentence structure, grammar and spelling. The English language manuscripts contain descriptions of individuals, locations, events, social structures and contrasting/conflicting narratives. These artefacts have active communities of interest because of their wider social and historical implications that transcend geographical and chronological boundaries and continue to shape opinions and values to this day.
The 1641 Depositions. Handwritten Manuscripts and Associated Imagery
IPSA: The Imaginum Patavinae Scientiae Archivum
The Imaginum Patavinae Scientiae Archivum (IPSA) collection is a digital archive of illuminated herbals manuscripts dating from the 14th century with Latin language commentaries. Herbals are manuscripts which contain hand-drawn depictions of plants, such as trees, bushes or shrubs, and their parts, such as flowers or leaves. The IPSA collection contains herbals written and illustrated by the Paduan School, and successive herbals produced in Europe under its influence. Such manuscripts have the rare characteristic of containing high quality and very realistic botanical illustrations directly drawn from nature. IPSA is a combination of digitised images of the manuscripts and related metadata information.
From a technical perspective, IPSA represents a very different kind of digital humanities collection to the 1641 collection. The IPSA collection is primarily image based, with substantive metadata available. This metadata not only provides descriptive passages, but is also historically valuable as it captures the scientific processes which were prevalent during the creation of the original collection.
IPSA: Painted Image of Artemisia Tagantes and Associated Handwritten Manuscript
The contrast in knowledge domain and structure of the IPSA and 1641 content collections will demonstrate the broad applicability of the SNA, NLP and adaptive methods developed in CULTURA.
Further information on the 1641 Depositions are available at the 1641 Depositions project web site.
Further information on IPSA are available at the IPSA web site.
