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

爱尔兰在全球地图和地图制作史上具有特别重要的地位。两个世纪前，该岛成为第一个完全以6英寸1英里的大比例尺绘制地图的国家。虽然这在今天看来似乎没什么了不起，但这是一项重大成就。地图绘制者不仅在地面上调查和记录特征，他们还记录了一系列令人印象深刻的当地细节，包括民间传说、地名、古物、宗教和地形。所有这些工作都是在19世纪20年代至40年代由爱尔兰的地形测量局（OS）承担的。很快，2024年将是这一令人印象深刻的壮举开始的200周年纪念日，这为我们提供了一个及时的机会来重新评估操作系统对爱尔兰岛的影响和遗产。因此，这就是OS200项目作为英国-爱尔兰数字人文学科合作项目的主要目标。这个全爱尔兰的项目，“OS200：数字重新绘制爱尔兰的地形测量遗产”，将第一次将历史上的OS地图和文本连接在一起，形成一个免费访问的在线资源。这样做将使来自爱尔兰北部和南部的一组研究人员能够发现被OS雇佣的英国和爱尔兰人在绘制和记录景观和地点时生活和工作中隐藏和被遗忘的方面。OS200将使用新的创新数字方法、技术、工具和实践，向那些实地调查爱尔兰无数城镇并收集当地故事的人展示“地图背后”。该项目旨在通过操作系统留下的记录和账目，更好地了解“在野外”的生活。爱尔兰操作系统的这些遗产具有巨大的公共和学术重要性和兴趣，然而随着时间的推移，曾经由操作系统创建的一个连接的语料库已经变得支离破碎，分散在不同的集合中。OS200将重新连接并丰富这些材料，重新创建回忆录、草图、信件、姓名本和地图之间的联系，使其成为操作系统最初设想的整体。恰逢即将到来的爱尔兰操作系统200周年纪念，我们的项目将提供一个机会来重新评估爱尔兰操作系统地图的历史影响，以及他们的持久遗产。OS200将过去和现在连接起来，使用21世纪的技术来分析和可视化操作系统是如何在地面上运行的，当测绘员遇到“被测者”时。在爱尔兰的背景下，这一点非常重要，因为地图绘制者和被绘制者之间、外部权威机构（在这里是国家测绘机构OS）和全岛各地的当地社区之间的关系非常复杂，有时甚至很麻烦。有了数字人文学科的方法，这些关系可以以新的方式进行检查和探索，以“打开地图”，帮助我们更好地理解当地图绘制者进入景观并记录那里的东西时所涉及的过程和实践。对于爱尔兰来说，OS的这项工作具有重大而持久的意义，尤其是在记录和授权官方地名方面，这一过程在Brian Friel的著名戏剧“Translations”中得到了体现，尽管并非没有争议。我们在贝尔法斯特女王大学和利默里克大学之间的英国-爱尔兰研究合作，由皇家爱尔兰学院，北爱尔兰公共记录办公室和爱尔兰数字存储库支持，将重新审视操作系统如何不仅映射爱尔兰，而且在这个过程中他们如何帮助改变它。我们新的“OS200语料库”和研究成果涉及整个爱尔兰，它的城镇，教区，田地，农场和湖泊。由于对操作系统进行了及时的数字重新评估，OS200不仅将对爱尔兰人民和地方的地图和命名产生更深入、更批判性的理解，而且还将提供一个有形而持久的遗产，一个新的爱尔兰操作系统遗产的数字“重新映射”，供所有人参与、研究和发现。

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.