Hiding in plain sight! AI helps uncover hidden voices of women in early modern Ireland

A ground-breaking research project will harness powerful new digital technologies to uncover women’s experiences of extreme trauma and civil war in early modern Ireland.

The €2.5 million VOICES project, being launched at an event in Trinity Long Room Hub today [April 11^th], will also investigate women’s agency in this period and if they used periods of crisis to improve their lot.

It will revolutionise our understanding of 16^th and 17^th century Ireland and will offer a new narrative placing women’s perspectives at the centre of this transformative period of Irish history, explains Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity who is leading the VOICES project, funded by the European Research Council.

VOICES will also create and enable a new paradigm of historical research which will allow a new generation of scholars to answer longstanding research questions that were, until now, unachievable and even unimaginable.

“Women are largely absent from historical narratives, with the historical record privileging the perspectives of elites and elite men in particular. But ordinary women are not absent from the story of early modern Ireland; they are hiding in plain sight in fragments and passing mentions across a multitude of historic records – wills, maps, surveys, records of debt, and legal depositions,” explains Professor Ohlmeyer.

The VOICES team of historians, literary scholars, data analysts, and computer scientists will combine pioneering digital approaches with historical scholarship to recover in a holistic and integrated way the marginalised voices, lifecycles, and identities of these women hidden in the ever-growing ‘digital windfall’ of historical documents being made available online by institutions nationally and internationally.

AI-driven text recognition tools, such as Transkribus, will be employed to assist with accessing, searching and analysing of historical documents, and new Generative AI tools will be explored.

Professor Declan O’Sullivan, ADAPT Centre and School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity, who leads the computer science aspect of the project, explains: “I am delighted to be a co-investigator in the VOICES project. Accessing and processing a diversity of historical data sources, ranging from unstructured testaments and depositions right through to more structured records, and turning this data into meaningful knowledge that is easily accessible to the public and researchers alike, presents a real technical challenge. It is a technical challenge however that we in ADAPT are confident that Knowledge Graph and AI-driven technologies will help us overcome.”

The resulting curated data will be represented in a Knowledge Graph, which will transform how this wealth of unstructured information can be organised, represented and searched. This online research tool will turn raw information into knowledge—and this knowledge will power new research and discovery. It will be available to researchers and the public to use online for free.

The project is hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Institute in partnership with the Department of History in the School of Histories and Humanities, and the Science Foundation Ireland ADAPT Research Centre hosted in the School of Computer Science and Statistics(SCSS) in Trinity.

The five-year project will:

• Access, interrogate and document previously inaccessible information on ordinary women in Early Modern Ireland.
• Build a powerful open-access tool for research, the Knowledge Graph, which will drive new research and discovery.
• Undertake research to uncover the roles women played in Ireland at a time of profound economic, political, and cultural transformation.
• Document women’s experiences of social upheaval, bloody civil war and extreme trauma, especially sexual violence.
• Investigate if ordinary women used periods intense social upheaval to improve their lot through an analysis of female agency across this period.
• Serve as a case study for other research projects seeking to recover hidden and marginalised voices from historical records.

More about the VOICES project:

VOICES: Life and Death, War and Peace, c.1550-c.1700: Voices of Women in Early Modern Ireland is a €2.5 million five-year European Research Council Advanced Grant project led by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer in the School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity. It commenced in September 2023 and is hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Institute, in partnership with the Department of History in the School of Histories and Humanities, and the Science Foundation Ireland ADAPT Research Centre hosted in the School of Computer Science and Statistics (SCSS) in Trinity.