Ogham Palaeography+ (OPal+)

Ogham Palaeography+ (OPal+) aims at enhancing the awareness of the unique medieval Gaelic ogham script and disseminating the results of the UK-Ireland collaborative project OG(H)AM (https://ogham.glasgow.ac.uk/) by broadening its social and cultural reach and impact. Ogham is a unique and highly abstract writing system invented in early medieval Ireland to write the local Irish/Gaelic language on three-dimensional, less commonly on two-dimensional objects. Like a barcode, the script consists of strokes and notches along or across a stemline. Until now, the development of this script across time and space (i.e. its palaeography) has not been studied. OPal+ will pursue its aims in four separate strands of the project, each in collaboration with international social or academic institutions, research projects or artists.
In Strand 1, the team will update the software Archetype in collaboration with other international projects that research the history of writing and epigraphy. Archetype is a uniquely suitable platform to study and compare the variation of writing styles across time and space. Using the Archetype software, we will create the interactive platform OPal ('Ogham Palaeography') for further research by scholars and generally as a source for information about ogham. The team will start to fill the OPal with representative examples of ogham letters, from three-dimensional and from two-dimensional sources.
The tension between the second and third dimension is also one that will be examined in Strand 2. In a partnership with a creative artist, the scribal artist Thomas Keyes, and the Royal Irish Academy, the question will be asked how the materiality of manuscript writing influenced the ogham script when it 'stepped down' from the stones and was adopted for book writing. Keyes, who works in the interface of the medieval manuscript and the modern urban graffiti tradition, will produce an artwork that responds to the contents of some of the most famous manuscripts with ogham in the Royal Irish Academy.
In Strand 3, the OPal+ team will collaborate with the Devon-based social enterprise Aquafolium, who specialise in supporting people's well-being by connecting them with nature in a woodland environment. With their expertise in working with wood, Aquafolium will be able to shed light on the practice of writing ogham on wooden sticks. Although mentioned in medieval tales, this practice has not been researched before. The material result of this collaboration will be sets of wooden ogham sticks that can be used for educational purposes in museums and schools. Furthermore, Aquafolium will provide training to the OPal+ team to enhance its current outreach offering and diversify its social impact by focusing on outreach around wellbeing and on engaging disadvantaged and harder-to-reach groups.
In Strand 4, OPal+ will team up with the award-winning author and illustrator of children's books Chris Judge in order to develop first the concept for a children's book about ogham, and then to produce it with illustrations aimed at the age group of 5-9. In this way we hope to raise the awareness of and increase the knowledge about ogham among readers of a younger age group. In this way the project will literally have a cultural and social impact in generations to come.