Tuesday 21 October 2025 – Bronagh McShane and Felix Vanden Borre (Trinity College Dublin): Digitising Death: Gender, Genealogy, and the Experimental Recovery of Women’s Histories in Early Modern Ireland
This seminar is 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm BST live on Zoom at https://zoom.us/j/93388586494 later posted to our YouTube channel.
Session chair: TBC
Abstract: This paper explores how digital experimentation can reshape our understanding of early modern Irish history by enabling new ways to recover women’s lives from fragmented and underused sources. It focuses on a remarkable but largely overlooked dataset: the Funeral Entries held in the Genealogical Office of the National Library of Ireland. Compiled by the Ulster King of Arms between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, these manuscripts record death dates, familial ties, and social affiliations across Ireland. Preliminary analysis reveals that nearly 38% of entries concern women, an unusually high proportion for early modern sources.
As part of the European Research Council Advanced Grant VOICES project, we are working to make this collection searchable, analysable and interoperable through a two-stage process: first, by using Transkribus to generate automated transcriptions of the manuscripts; and second, by applying Named Entity Recognition (NER) to extract and map names, places, and relationships. This process is highly experimental and raises a range of challenges; from the variability and legibility of the manuscripts themselves to the inadequacies of out-of-the-box NER models when dealing with early modern English. Yet it is precisely in grappling with these limitations that digital methods prove their historiographical value.
Rather than offering a polished dataset, this paper reflects on how these imperfect tools and iterative processes help us rethink core questions: who is visible in the archive, what constitutes historical evidence, and how can we reimagine genealogical sources not just as records of male lineage, but as windows onto women’s social worlds?
