Workshop 3: Omagh

The third workshop took place at the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies in Omagh, Northern Ireland on Friday 14th and Saturday 15th March 2014. Details of the workshop can be found below.

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Programme outline

The aim of this workshop is to explore ways in which digital technologies can be used to visualise marked-up letter collections in useful and meaningful ways (using geo-tags to visualise spaces and the movement of people, for example, or using wordtrees and wordclouds to identify themes or phraseological patterns). In this workshop we plan to demonstrate and discuss the use of relevant visualisation tools for those working with migrant correspondence collections.

Friday 14th March

09.00-10.00: Coffee and introductions (including presentations from Marcelo Borges, Dickinson College and Daniel Necas, IHRC, University of Minnesota)

10.00-10.30: Overview of project progress to date with a particular focus on work that has been carried out since Workshop 2 in Lancaster (Emma Moreton, Coventry University).

10.30-11.30: Interconnecting metadata: a report on work carried out to extrapolate, standardise and interconnect the metadata relating to emigrant letter collections held at the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies at the Ulster American Folk Park Museum and the Immigration History Research Centre at the University of Minnesota (Peter Stadler, Universität Paderborn and Luis Anke, Universitat Pompeu Fabra).

11.30-11.45: Coffee break

11.45-12.30: Using visualisation tools to explore the metadata: possibilities and challenges (Niall O'Leary, Freelance Developer).

12.30-13.00: Open discussion and feedback regarding the TEI schema, developed by Peter, and the visualisation tools, demonstrated by Niall.

13.00-14.00: Lunch

14.00-15.00: Getting inside the letter: using visualisation tools to explore the language of emigrant correspondence (Chris Culy, Tübingen University).

15.00-15.15: Coffee break

15.15-16.15: Transcribing historical texts in TEI - a better way! (Mike Olson, Utrecht University).

16.15-17.00: Using NLP tools to identify people and places in a collection of 19th century emigrant letters (José Comacho Collados, ATILF-CNRS, Nancy, France and Luis Anke, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain).

17.00-17.30: Round up and close (Emma Moreton, Coventry University).

Saturday 15th March 

09.00-09.30: 'New Directions in the Study of Irish Emigrant Letters - harnessing the power of the digital humanities' (Patrick O'Sullivan, NYU).

09.30-10.00: Dissemination activities to date and future plans (Emma Moreton, Coventry University).

10.00-10.30: Coffee break

10.30-11.30: Exhibition plans (the end of project exhibition will take at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry from 18-22 May). Open discussion led by Patrick Fitzgerald.

11.30-12.00: Round-up and close (Emma Moreton, Coventry University).