“The UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics provides a coherent research ecosystem for the digital humanities, develops support for ongoing collaboration, acts as a focus and host for international networks and an incubator for new projects in a rapidly developing and prestigious field.”
– Professor Gerardine Meaney (Director)
projects
Explore the projects at University College Dublin
VICTEUR: European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant of €2.5 million for a study focused on migration and culture.
The 5-year study will involve text analysis of nearly 36,000 books, in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus, and shared by them in digital format with the research team.
Contagion, Biopolitics and Cultural Memory is using large scale historical datasets to understand contemporary attitudes and improve public health outcomes.
The project seeks to illuminate culturally and historically specific understandings of disease that appear within a collection of 49,000 literary works that have been digitised by the British Library, published between the 1500s and the early 20th century.
The archive is a repository that holds recordings of Irish poets and writers, reading their own work and giving a brief overview of the circumstances that influenced the writing of their poems.
This collection aims to capture and preserve the rich and diverse landscape of poetry in Ireland. It includes the voices of: established poets; emerging poets; performance poets; avant-garde poets; English and Irish language poets; and Irish diaspora poets.
Dr Katie Mishler is a postdoctoral researcher in the UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics. Her project, Mapping Gothic Dublin: Historical and Literary Hauntings 1820-1900, was awarded funding as part of an Irish Research Council Enterprise Partnership scheme in partnership with the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI).
The project, along with the related podcast series, looks at how histories of urban planning, political change, and architecture shaped the writing of authors such as Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Maturin.
The Digital Multimedia Edition of James Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was created by a team of researchers from UCD’s Nation, Genre and Gender Project, as part of the Decade of Centenaries (2012-2022), which celebrates Irish history and cultural heritage.
The edition reproduces the text of the first publication of this novel as a single volume, by B. W. Huebsch Inc, in New York, 1916. The edition is available to download as a free audiobook, recorded by Irish actors Sam and Barry McGovern, as well as in Kindle.
Ghost stories remain an essential part of the Irish storytelling tradition. This website gives the modern reader an introduction to some of these tales.
It showcases a small sample of nineteenth century ghost stories by Charlotte Riddell (1832-1906) and Rosa Mulholland (1841-1921) and further resources on the early twentieth-century gothic writing of Dorothy Macardle (1889-1958). Its aim is to further promote engagement with the ghostly fictions of these three important Irish writers.
In 2009, the Irish Government published the Ryan Report, an expansive inquiry into child abuse at residential institutions for children run by the Catholic Church between 1936 and 1999.
Industrial Memories helps make further sense of the Ryan Report by revealing the distressing scale and systemic nature of abuse during this period, bringing users closer to the voices and experiences of people inside the system.
Combining literary and data science expertise, Nation, Genre, Gender maps and analyses social networks in Irish and English fiction, 1800-1922.
It explores how writers and readers have imagined the connections between people in their society and turned those connections into plots. The project, funded by the Irish Research Council, has completed work on 46 novels to date.
PEOPLE
The Centre is a unique collaboration between researchers in literature, history, art history, poetry, and data analytics.
The research team combines UCD’s strengths in cultural criticism and social network analysis, traditional humanities and new computational approaches, established and early stage researchers.
data
The research projects at UCD are using new computational approaches and analytical techniques which have led to the creation of data sets which will prove invaluable to researchers across a number of subject areas.
news and Events
Bodies of Data: Intersecting Medical and Digital Humanities
This Irish Humanities Alliance conference addressed the emerging discipline of the medical humanities at the intersection between arts and humanities and the biomedicine which explores the social, historical and cultural dimensions to medicine.
Celebrating a Century of Icelandic Sovereignty
On 1 December 2018, Iceland celebrated the centenary of its status as a sovereign state. On 5 December, scholars and writers from UCD Dublin and University of Iceland commemorated this momentous event in Icelandic history with a series of talks at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin.
podcasts
Researchers associated with the Centre for Cultural Analytics regularly give papers at academic conferences and public events.
Many of these events have been recorded and you can now listen back to podcasts of presentations and papers on a whole host of topics related to our work.