OS200: Digitally Re-Mapping Ireland's Ordnance Survey Heritage

Lead Research Organisation: Queen's University Belfast
Department Name: Sch of Natural and Built Environment

Abstract

Ireland has particular importance in the global history of maps and map-making. Two centuries ago, the island became the first country to be mapped entirely at the large scale of six inches to one mile. While today this might seem unremarkable at the time it was a major achievement. Not only did the map-makers survey and record features on the ground, they recorded an impressive range of local details, including folklore, place-names, antiquities, religion and topography. All of this work was undertaken by the Ordnance Survey (OS) in Ireland during the 1820s-1840s. Very soon, 2024 will be the bicentenary anniversary of the start of this impressive feat, which offers us a timely opportunity to re-evaluate the impacts and legacies of the OS on the island of Ireland. This, then, is the main aim of the OS200 project as a UK-Ireland collaboration in Digital Humanities.

This all-Ireland project, "OS200: Digitally Re-mapping Ireland's Ordnance Survey Heritage", will link together historic OS maps and texts to form a single freely-accessible online resource for the first time. Doing so will enable a team of researchers from across Ireland--north and south--to uncover otherwise hidden and forgotten aspects of the life and work of those from Britain and Ireland employed by the OS as they mapped and recorded landscapes and localities. Using new and innovative digital methods, techniques, tools and practices, OS200 will look 'behind the map' to those on the ground who surveyed Ireland's myriad townlands and gathered local stories. The project seeks to understand better this life 'in the field' through the records and accounts left behind by the OS. These legacies of the OS in Ireland are of immense public and academic importance and interest, yet over time what was once a connected corpus of material created by the OS has become fragmented and scattered across different collections. OS200 will reconnect and enrich these materials, recreating connections between memoirs, sketches, letters, name-books and maps, into the whole the OS originally conceived them to be. Timed to coincide with the upcoming bicentenary of the OS in Ireland, our project will offer an opportunity to reappraise the historic impacts of the OS's mapping of Ireland, and their lasting legacies.

OS200 connects past and present using 21st-century technologies to analyse and visualise how the OS operated, on the ground, as surveyors encountered 'the surveyed'. This is so important in the context of Ireland, with the complex and sometimes troubled relationships between map-makers and the mapped, between outside authorities-in this case the OS as a state mapping agency-and local communities across the island. With Digital Humanities approaches, these relationships can be examined and explored in new ways to 'open up the map', to help us understand better the processes and practices involved when map-makers went out into the landscape and recorded what was there.

For Ireland this work by the OS had great and lasting significance, not least in recording and authorising official place-names, a process captured though not without controversy by Brian Friel's well-known play, 'Translations'. Our UK-Ireland research collaboration between Queen's University Belfast and the University of Limerick, supported by the Royal Irish Academy, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and Digital Repository of Ireland, will re-examine how the OS not only mapped Ireland, but how also in the process they helped to transform it. Our new 'OS200 corpus' and research outcomes relate to the whole of Ireland, its townlands, parishes, fields, farms and loughs. As a result of this timely digital re-appraisal of the OS, not only will OS200 create a deeper and more critical understanding of the mapping and naming of Ireland's people and places, it will provide a tangible and lasting legacy itself, a new digital 're-mapping' of Ireland's OS heritage for all to engage with, study and discover.

Publications

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Description OS200 has created a searchable database of records relating to the the early Ordnance Survey in Ireland. This will be launched as a public, free to access online platform in June 2024.
Exploitation Route The dataset will be used by a wide range of audiences, including heritage practitioners, and in education and engagement.
Sectors Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)

Culture

Heritage

Museums and Collections

URL https://www.irelandmapped.ie/
 
Description So far the findings have been used as a basis for public engagement and outreach activity by partner bodies.
First Year Of Impact 2023
Sector Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
Impact Types Cultural

Societal

 
Description Carto-Cymru symposium 2023 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact From the web-site
Once again this May sees another Carto-Cymru - The Wales Map Symposium. This time we will be meeting face to face, for the first time since 2019. This is the seventh annual symposium and our theme this year is the work of the Ordnance Survey (OS). We will be looking at how approaches to mapping the landscape have changed over time and how historical OS maps can help us to understand our physical environment both past and present.

As usual the event is being held jointly between the National Library and the Royal Commission who are based here in the Library's building. This year's event is also being held in association with the Charles Close Society and ties in with their AGM which is also being held at the Library the next day.

We have a very exciting line-up of speakers this year, we will be welcoming back some old hands, but also seeing some new faces.

Our first speaker will be Keith Lilley, Professor of Historical Geography at Queen's University, Belfast. Keith is one of our regular speakers, this will be his fourth appearance at the event and this time his topic will be 'Excavating' the map: Landscapes of the Early Ordnance Survey in Great Britain and Ireland.

Keith will be examining the relationship between 'map' and 'field' looking at sites of survey and survey practices that not only shaped the making of the finished map but also materially shaped those landscapes the map represents. He will then go on to look to the OS maps themselves, to reveal insights into the field-operations of those OS personnel on the ground.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
URL https://blog.library.wales/carto-cymru-the-wales-map-symposium-2023/
 
Description Public lecture 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact From the Armagh Robinson Library web-site:

Who mapped Ireland, and how? Spanning five centuries of mapping in Ireland, this talk by historical geographers Professor Keith Lilley (Queen's University Belfast) and Dr Catherine Porter (University of Limerick) explores the importance of field-survey in the map-making process. From the early-seventeenth century maps of Josias Bodley and the Escheated Counties of Ulster, through to the early Ordnance Survey six-inch maps under Thomas Colby, it journeys through Ireland's rich cartographic heritage, revisiting those landscapes and localities where surveyors traversed and plotted the ground. Looking 'behind' the map, to the field, opens up new and interesting perspectives on how Ireland was mapped in the past.

Armagh Robinson Library is grateful to the Northern Ireland Museums Council and the Art Fund for supporting the lecture through their 'Museums Connect' programme.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://armaghrobinsonlibrary.co.uk/aiovg_videos/a-journey-through-maps-exploring-irelands-cartograp...
 
Description QUB Institute of Irish Studies research seminar 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact This seminar draws on new research at Queen's University Belfast and the University of Limerick co-funded through a bilateral programme between the Irish Research Council (grant ref: IRC/W001802/1) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant ref: AH/W001802/1). Timed to coincide with the 2024 bicentenary of the inauguration of the OS in Ireland, 'OS200: Digitally Re-mapping Ireland's Ordnance Survey Heritage' is a cross-disciplinary and supranational project that uses digital humanities tools and methods to 'open up the map', to reveal otherwise hidden geographies of field encounters across Ireland and the practices of those employed and engaged with the survey. Exploring the spaces and places of the Ordnance Survey in Ireland using digital analyses to 'excavate' historic OS maps, name books, letters and memoirs, the paper will report on the project's new discoveries, reflecting critically on the cultural impacts the OS had in Ireland two hundred years ago.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
URL https://www.qub.ac.uk/events/whats-on/listing/irishstudiesseminar-keithlilley.html