A new study from the VOICES Project examines how benchmarking digital methods can advance historical research by recovering women’s lives from fragmented archives.
Titled “Digitising Death: Benchmarking Genealogical Data and Recovering Women’s Histories in Early Modern Ireland,” the article brings together researchers including Bronagh Ann McShane, Diego Rincon-Yanez, Felix Vanden Borre, Jane Ohlmeyer, and Declan O’Sullivan. Their work explores how digital methods can help recover women’s experiences from fragmented and often overlooked archival sources.
The study centres on the Funeral Entries preserved at the National Library of Ireland, a collection compiled between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries by the Ulster King of Arms. These manuscripts record death dates, family connections, and social ties, and notably include a significant proportion of women, around 38 percent, offering rare insights into gender, memory, and kinship in the period.
Using this material, the researchers tested artificial intelligence tools such as Handwritten Text Recognition and Named Entity Recognition to evaluate how well they handle early modern spelling, multilingual names, and inconsistent manuscript forms. The findings highlight both the challenges and the potential of AI in transforming access to historical data.
The publication is part of a wider €2.5 million European Research Council-funded initiative led by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer at Trinity College Dublin. Launched in 2023, the project aims to recover women’s voices from early modern archives through interdisciplinary collaboration between historians and computer scientists.
