Literary Dublin in the Digital Archive

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is delighted to be running a one-day symposium ‘Literary Dublin in the Digital Archive’ sponsored by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature and Dublin City Council. This event will feature a range of multi-disciplinary experts who work on Dublin including writers, geographers, historians and archivists. It will focus on what digital literary collections are out there and how they can be used. 

The event will explore literary collections held by Dublin City Library and Archive (DCLA), Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and DRI. The day will feature practitioners who have used digital archives to build literary-themed repositories and narratives around Dublin’s literary heritage including Charles Travis from the Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922-1948 and Emma Clarke from Dublin Ghost Signs. We will also look at what digital sources are available to writers of historical fiction to assist them in building up a picture of who lived in Dublin in the past. Zoe Reid from the National Archives of Ireland (NAI) will speak about how we can use Irish Census Data to build up detailed pictures of people’s lives, while Niav Gallagher from the Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB) will uncover the lives of famous Dubliners and show how the DIB can be used for literary research. Kelly Fitzgerald from the School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore School in University College Dublin will discuss how the National  Folklore Collection can be used to find authentic voices from the past. There will be a round table discussion with authors Martina Devlin, Emily Hourican and Eoghan Smith that will explore what sources fiction writers use when they set their novels in the past. The day will finish with a wrap-up by Niamh Cullen of Queen's University Belfast. 

[Image: Fáilte Ireland. (2020) Joyce Tower, Digital Repository of Ireland [Distributor], Dublin City Library and Archive [Depositing Institution], https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.xw431s684]