Researchers are gathering in Galway this week for a 'hackathon' exploring how technology can be used in the study of ancient manuscripts.
The event is taking place in PorterShed, a collaborative workspace for startups and entrepreneurs.
The hackathon is focussing on STEMMA, a project from the University of Galway that uses data-driven approaches to study the circulation of early modern English poetry in manuscript form.
STEMMA, Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, focuses on English verse manuscripts written and used between the introduction of printing in England in 1475 and 1700.
The STEMMA team has built a significant database enabling scholars to trace how stories, histories and legends have changed over time and across regions.
The hackathon challenges participants to work with a dataset of bibliographical metadata and selected lines from nearly 160,000 transcripts of early modern poetry to identify patterns or anomalies in the data that could unlock new avenues for scholarly research.
The participants are drawn from diverse digital humanities backgrounds who are collaborating with computer science students and technical experts to explore fresh ways of working with the STEMMA data.
Tomorrow, teams will pitch their findings, demonstrating how the power of technology and the humanities can come together to transform the study of ancient manuscripts.
"Researchers in the humanities often imagine fascinating questions, but may not know the precise technical steps to answer them," said Professor Erin A McCarthy, STEMMA Project.
"By involving technologists and computer science students, these researchers are no longer limited by their technical skills - only by their imaginations," Prof McCarthy added.
