Developing a Digital Framework for the Medieval Gaelic World

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Recent decades have witnessed remarkable advances in the availability and variety of online resources for research into the pre-Modern world. We often think that this will make research easier, faster and more efficient, but there is a recognition that it has also changed the nature of scholarly research and the ways in which the public can interact with it. This network will focus on the impact of digitisation on research into medieval Ireland and Scotland. We hope that a better understanding of how we currently use digital resources will lead to improved applications of technology in future research and more intelligent, innovative use of resources. Gaelic is the native language spoken in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man for the best part of the last two thousand years. Despite its longevity, the language has been marginalised over recent centuries and has become a largely hidden heritage. However, it contains the most extensive early literature in a native language in Europe outside of Greek and Latin, stretching from the 7th century to the present day, including a vast body of tales, history, laws, and poetry which is wholly unparalleled anywhere in the world. Digitisation has the potential to open up the resources for Gaelic literature and history to a much wider audience and to transform the nature of research.Despite appearances, a medieval text in a modern edition, whether online or in print, is rarely a true reflection of what medieval scholars wrote. Modern researchers presenting such texts make certain decisions about what to display. As most texts appear in multiple manuscripts, the editor has to make many often significant choices that can radically affect the meaning of a text. This mediating of the original is often exacerbated in digital editions. When they appear in print, editions often contain an elaborate apparatus to represent the variations in the manuscripts but this is much more difficult to represent in digital editions due to technical and financial constraints. Ironically, therefore, an online edition of a text often lacks this rich contextual information and privileges a single, processed text - a single view of the past. On the other hand, digitisation also brings enormous power to view texts in new ways. By digitally tagging particular features, such as dates, names and places, researchers have created innovative methods for reading texts. Reading no longer needs to be a linear experience, going from start to finish, but users can construct their own pathways through texts and create new meaning in the process. This network will examine how digitisation has changed the way we access and read materials from the medieval world.The long-term sustainability of electronic resources remains a burning issue. Printed books are carefully catalogued and preserved in libraries, but online resources are frequently neglected by the organisations usually charged with conserving knowledge. Moreover, changes in technology can render documents inaccessible or unusable. The use of open standards can ameliorate this situation, but more complex websites require sophisticated software to perform advanced searches that allow us to access the material effectively and add value, and these programs are much more difficult to protect for the future. It is vital, therefore, that we consider not only how to represent our hidden heritage online, but also how to secure it for the future.