Context and Relationships: Ireland and Irish Studies

FAIN: PK-50027-07

University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)
Michael Keeble Buckland (Project Director: March 2007 to April 2011)

Development of a testbed of Irish studies materials and three open-source tools, broadly applicable to text-based collections, to serve as an Internet age "reference section" and to enable students, scholars, and librarians to establish scholarly context from digital collections.

Students, editors, researchers, and the public are necessarily concerned with the context and relationships of names and topics found when reading texts. What other documents relate this topic? Where and when did this happen? What else was going on around that time and place? Who were the people and institutions mentioned? How were they related? What else did they do? This project will develop three tools: A Context Finder will find information in reference works about names, words, or phrases found when reading; a Context Builder will annotate texts with the source of information for the next reader; and reference works will be enriched by Context Provider to show where the names or topics were mentioned in texts. An international collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, and the Queen's University, Belfast will develop these tools for texts relating to Ireland.