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The Published Works of Eilís Dillon: Editions and Translations

The original website, The Published Works of Eilís Dillon: Editions and Translations, formed part of a PhD study which examines, from a number of perspectives, the literary career of internationally acclaimed writer, Eilís Dillon (1920-1994).

The print element of the dissertation entitled 'The Tyranny of the Past?, Revolution, Retrospection and Remembrance in the work of Eilís Dillon', explores the writer's emphasis on memory - individual, collective and national. It assesses how her knowledge of the history of Ireland, and of the language and culture of its people, impacted on her portrayal of the Irish nation for a twentieth-century audience of both adult and child readers. It also attempts to understand the ways in which Dillon, by focusing on the colourful tapestry of past events, acknowledged the dark shadow of violence while simultaneously promoting respect and understanding of the country's struggle for independence. Dillon was fascinated with the role of the writer in society and appreciated the privileged and respected place the artist has traditionally enjoyed in Ireland. In her view, this respect places a duty and responsibility on the artist towards his or her people. For Dillon, writing was intertwined with a deep love of country; a form of patriotism, which although first expressed by others as militant nationalism, was later adapted to accommodate the evolving maturation of a democratic state with the economic and cultural development that this entailed. Dillon's prolific output in a variety of genres is testament to her equal commitment to literature and to her country. The data presented here allows easy access to relevant bibliographic detail of her published work and its various editions and translations.

About the project

The creation of the original website formed part of a collaborative project between three similar digital humanities research tasks undertaken by students supported and funded by St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, Dublin (SPD), Dublin City University(DCU) and An Foras Feasa: The Institute for Research in Irish Historical and Cultural Traditions(AFF) in collaboration with the Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO). In addition to the above organisations, significant information was also provided by members of the Ó Cuilleanáin family.

You can read Eilís Dillon's biography and you can find out more detail about the project from the editorial notes.

Sources

In the course of developing this database of the published works of Eilís Dillon, a number of sources were consulted including, the National Libraries of the countries of publication, Irish libraries, publisher catalogues, specialist online booksellers, ISBN databases as well as the Eilís Dillon website. Information was also provided by members of Dillon's family. While every effort was made to create a comprehensive, accurate and detailed record of Eilís Dillon's publications, errors and omissions may unintentionally occur.

Licensing

The content is freely available for fair use under the Creative Commons Attribute-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike license.

Database development followed TEI Guidelines and is presented using the Exhibit Framework from MIT's SIMILE project.

Download

As of August 30, 2013, the activities of Digital Humanities Observatory have ceased and since then, the original website for the Published Works of Eilís Dillon: Editions and Translations has been unpublished. As a result, the files necessary to enable individuals to run this site themselves are available as a downloadable zip. Please see below instructions for details.

Instructions

"This site uses a JavaScript framework called Exhibit (http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/) developed by MIT. In order to work, the data, stored in a file called data.json, must be hosted on a web server. For this reason, most of the site content and functionality will not be available when hosting the entire site locally on a user's own computer.  To enable the full functionality of this site, the site should be hosted on a web server.  Ensure the following:

  1. Unzip the website using your prefered software package.
  2. Ensure you have access to a web server (this would usually be hosted on a hosting service such as Blacknight or a Cloud-based solution such as Amazon Web Services).
  3. Copy the entire contents of the website to an accessible location on your web server (either in or below the web root) using an FTP client (such as WinSCP or Cyberduck).
  4. Access the site by navigating to the index.html page, e.g. http://www.mydomain.ie/index.html

Alternatively, if you do not want to access the full site externally, you can host only the site data file externally. You will still need access to a web server, but you need only copy the data.json file to your web server. If you do this:

  1. Take note of the fully qualified web address of this file, e.g. http://www.mydomain.ie/data.json
  2. In every HTML file where the line: <link href="data.json" type="application/json" rel="exhibit/data" /> appears, replace the reference to the data file with the new location, e.g.: <link href="http://www.mydomain.ie/data.json" type="application/json" rel="exhibit/data" />

Please note that due to changes in the licensing model for Google Maps, mapping functionality may not work as intended.

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