Digital Scholarship Seminar 38: Deirdre Ní Chonghaile

Duplicates & doppelgängers: Generating digital solutions to cataloguing, accessibility and network-analysis challenges

A NUI Postdoctoral Fellow in Irish/Celtic Studies affiliated with Roinn na Gaeilge and based in the Moore Institute, Deirdre Ní Chonghaile aims to generate discussion of some of her digital humanities research challenges with the Digital Scholarship Seminar. She will highlight three archival collections and three challenges: cataloguing the Irish recordings of Sidney Robertson Cowell (1955-57), dispersed and duplicated across two institutions; designing an open-access digital archive o…f the wax cylinder recordings of Prof. Tomás Ó Máille (1909-1938); and generating a research strategy for the digital re-imagining of the Rev. Murphy collection of song manuscripts and annotated print journal An Gaodhal (1884-1920s), which represents an unprecedented contribution to the network-mapping of sean-nós song practice in pre-literate, print and transatlantic contexts. Together, these challenges present a rare opportunity to investigate how digital functionalities can facilitate our efforts to trace and demonstrate the relationships between oral, literary and performance practices of Irish traditional music.

Dr Deirdre Ní Chonghaile (BA Oxon, MA Oxon, PhD) is NUI Fellow in Irish/Celtic Studies at the Moore Institute in NUI Galway. Previously, she was NEH Keough Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Alan Lomax Fellow in the Library of Congress, and Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at NUI Galway, where she also worked more recently with the Digital Cultures Initiative. She is currently preparing a book on music-collecting in Ireland and researching a recently uncovered collection of sean-nós song manuscripts created in Pennsylvania, the Rev. Daniel J. Murphy Collection, which constitutes the largest extant manuscript collection of Irish song ever to have been created by independent collectors.