Language and Linguistic Evidence in the 1641 Depositions

The '1641 Depositions' in Trinity College Dublin (hereafter TCD) comprise some 4,000 personal statements, in which mainly Protestant men and women of all classes told of their experiences following the outbreak of the rebellion by the Catholic Irish in 1641. Collected by government-appointed commissioners, the witness testimony runs to approximately 20,000 pages, and constitutes the chief evidence for the sharply contested allegation that the rebellion began with a general massacre of protestant settlers. As a result, this material has been central to protracted and bitter historical dispute.

This body of material, unparalleled elsewhere in early modern Europe, provides a unique source of information for the causes and events surrounding the 1641 rebellion and for the social, economic, cultural, religious, political and linguistic history of seventeenth-century Ireland, England and Scotland. In addition, the depositions vividly document various colonial and 'civilizing' processes, including the spread of Protestantism in one of the remotest regions of the Stuart kingdoms and the introduction of lowland agricultural and commercial practices, together with the native response to these developments. Earlier major grants from the AHRC and the IRCHSS have sponsored the transcription and digitization of the depositions, making them available online and amenable to analysis by a variety of scholars and thereby facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration.

The current proposal aims to explore how a computer environment can be created in which scholars interested in historical and corpus linguistics can work collaboratively with historians and other specialists to interrogate the 1641 Depositions, in ways not currently possible, by exploiting effective language technology developed by IBM LanguageWare. The principal objective of the project is to create a personalised computer environment in which linguistic researchers can conduct sophisticated discovery, analysis and visualisation of the digitised 1641 Depositions, and collaborate in real time with colleagues on these resources. The long-term outcome of this research can help to drive a revolution in the way linguistic and historical research is conducted in the Digital Humanities. Developing a Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) compliant corpus and following accepted international standards that address interoperability issues will enable the project to link with other crucial digital research initiatives, including DARIAH and CLARIN.

Recorded in Early Modern English, the Depositions provide evidence of linguistic variation in Ireland on the micro-level, while on the macro-level they represent (quasi-)legal discourse and the discourse of massacre. EME variability coupled with shifting voices in the Depositions present linguists (and computer analysts) with particular challenges and will require considerable interdisciplinary consultation.

Within the overall aims of the project, the specific linguistic objectives are as follows: to develop language models for seventeenth-century English in Ireland; to develop ontologies of seventeenth-century English, surnames and place names; to investigate the possibility of localizing morphological and lexical variants in mediated text; to investigate 17th century legal discourse as it is represented in the texts, with particular attention to the framing of the discourse, leading to a linguistic assessment of the quality and nature of the evidence in the Depositions; and to investigate the discourse of massacre, atrocity and ethnic cleansing presented in the witness testimony.

Extended contact between specialists in a variety of fields, from Computer Science to History, to Atrocity Studies, to Linguistics, and between industry and academia, is an outstanding feature of this proposal, which hinges upon real knowledge exchange andresource enhancement.

This project will engender rich collaboration and knowledge sharing between IBM and linguistic and historical researchers. It will provide IBM with a unique insight into evolving Digital Humanities research practices and will enable academic researchers to explore the research opportunities offered by the next generation of web-based digital content and collaboration technologies. This project can only be delivered in consultation with highly specialized researchers who are committed to using new technologies to advance knowledge in an innovative and collaborative fashion, approaches that historians/humanities researchers rarely adopt, often preferring to work as 'lone' scholars.

Insights achieved in this project can add considerable value to (content) resources as well as providing unique insight into how technologies support collaborative and individual working practices. The project is an excellent example of how the combination of Digital Humanities communities, technical research groups and industrial partners can reveal insights into how emergent technology can be best applied and customised for challenging domains.

Knowledge transfer is best achieved through human interactions. Not only is this one of the most effective ways for direct knowledge transfer, it also contributes to breaking down cultural barriers between the sectors. Links on a personal level between the two sectors are needed to support formal links on an organisational level, to overcome cultural barriers and to help address perceived problems between the two sectors.

As the number of informal Web communication channels, such as blogs or tweets, grows, the information contained in these communication forums is now regarded to be of critical value. The ability to harness this 'noisy text' and convert it into business insight is becoming increasingly important. Humanities data is challenging in that it represents, in a single domain, the most complex aspects of the entire 'discovery' challenge. It comprises large volumes of data, massively distributed, in multiple formats, structured and unstructured. It is complex and verbose, with globally distributed and varied users across disciplines. It presents an indeterminate number of possible discovery patterns, and the humanities community is currently undergoing a dramatic transformation. It is these very challenges, and the broad applicability of the technology derived from this research, that makes this project interesting for the commercial sector.

The impact of such new methods of research on teaching and research at the university level is potentially very great, and will serve to narrow the gap between 'academic' and 'professional' training and refresh students' conceptions of the relevance and applicability of the study of humanistic subjects. Moreover, many of the skills imparted by such research methods are transferable to other academic and professional activities and therefore make students' training potentially more marketable outside academia.

The technologies developed as a result of this project will also enable humanities scholars to disseminate research findings to the general public in a more accessible and interactive way. This will in turn facilitate more informed debates around key issues - identity formation, shaping civil society, migration, conflict and reconciliation - that dominate current historical and political discourse.