Harnessing digital technologies to transform understanding of ogham writing, from the 4th century to the 21st. Short title: OG(H)AM

The project's objective is to harness digital tools from different fields to transform scholarly and popular understanding of Ogham - an ancient script unique to Ireland and Britain. At a more general level, it provides a potential model of collaborative ways of working to ensure the long-term sustainability, continued development, and inter-operability of diverse digital resources for multi-disciplinary humanities research. It addresses the challenge of giving continued and renewed life to existing digital resources beyond the end of individual funded projects by integrating them with new data created using subsequent technological and intellectual advances. Through collaborative working, resource-sharing and skills-exchange the project will strengthen partnerships between academia, museums, libraries, and state heritage agencies across all 6 nations in the UK, Ireland and Man. It will also contribute to Europe-wide collaboration in digital epigraphy and place Ogham in the vanguard of global epigraphical studies.

Ogham is highly unusual among world writing systems. It entirely lacks iconicity: like a barcode, it consists solely of a succession of straight lines. It is read vertically and is written in 3 dimensions across the edge of a solid object (using letters which consist of bundles of 1-5 short parallel lines, their value depending on their position relative to a baseline). Its heyday was the 1st Millenium CE, but knowledge of it never died out. Texts written in this ingenious script are of international significance to historical linguists as the earliest evidence for the Gaelic languages. We will digitally document all c.640 examples of Ogham writing in all media, from its origin in the fourth century CE until the dawn of the modern revival c.1850. We will build on the success of the 'Ogham in 3D' website (2012-15, 2016-17), created by our partner organisations, the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, the Discovery Programme, and the National Monuments Service which covers c.25% of surviving ogham and provides detailed supporting information, photographs, & 3D models. We will upgrade its data and metadata, enhance its searchability, and greatly expand its thematic, chronological & geographical scope by including Oghams from the whole island of Ireland (i.e. including Northern Ireland) and from outside Ireland. The latter - from Scotland, Wales, Man, England, and Continental libraries - comprise almost a third of the total surviving. We will also move beyond stone monuments to include portable objects, graffiti, and manuscripts.

We will document in 3D all Ogham in the collections of the national museums (the British Museum; the National Museums of Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales; and the Manx Museum), with the support of state heritage agencies in 4 countries. Additional joint fieldwork in all six nations will allow us to more than treble the number of 3D models available to nearly 80% of the corpus. Uniting this scattered evidence will transform Ogham studies, and connect local communities with their heritage. We will work with the Discovery Programme to evaluate the effectiveness of different methods of 3D recording and visualization, and use for analysis techniques hitherto used only for documentation. We will refine new methods of digital groove analysis (to identify the work of individual carvers and establish the contemporaneity of different carvings) and digital reconstruction of worn detail. We will conduct analysis based on the new documentation, using analogue and new digital techniques, including computational corpus linguistics.

The enduring social value of Ogham is reflected in its increasing popularity for decorative, symbolic, and creative functions. The project will support this use of Ogham in contemporary culture by responding to the need for authoritative guidance on writing accurate and authentic Ogham, and by inspiring new & innovative applications and artistic responses.