FCenturies ago, Dublin had an official “garbage collector” who was tasked with leading sanitation crews to clear the streets of human and animal waste. In return, the scavenger collected tolls from merchants and merchants.
It could have worked well, except that the contractor decided to cut costs and maximize profits by using only two carts instead of six. The manure piled up and the city stank.
This upset everyone except the scavenger, who pocketed enough cash to establish herself as a pawnbroker. Her name was Catherine Strong.
In 1635, the city dismissed her, ending an intriguing if inglorious career in public service. And then, like so many women of her time, Strong disappeared into history, her entrepreneurship (creditable or not) barely reaching a footnote in the Irish chronicles written by men about men.
Trinity College Dublin aims to remedy this with an ambitious research project launched this week that will use artificial intelligence and other digital technologies to uncover the experiences of women in Ireland between 1500 and 1700.
Jane Ohlmeyer, a history professor who directs the project, titled Voicessaid: “Women are largely absent from historical narratives, and the historical record privileges the perspectives of elites and elite men in particular.
“But ordinary women are not absent from the history of early modern Ireland; they hide in plain sight in fragments and make mention through a multitude of historical records: wills, maps, surveys, debt records and legal declarations.”
Historians, literary scholars, data analysts and computer scientists would collaborate in an innovative effort to recover marginalized voices and, it is hoped, set an example for other overlooked narratives, such as the experience of women in colonial-era Latin America, Ohlmeyer said. . “Our approach is transferable and applicable to other countries.”
The five-year project, funded by a €2.5m (£2.1m) European Research Council grant, will document the roles women played during social and political upheavals that included massacres, violence sexual and extreme trauma.
AI and other tools will collect names from sources such as legal records, inquisitions, censuses, and basic lending and borrowing records, accumulating material that will be organized into a “knowledge graph,” an online resource that will be available to researchers and the public. . public for free.
“The documents will talk to each other so we can start connecting people. We can develop these profiles of people who were just a name before,” says Ohlmeyer.
OpenAI’s GPT-4 and AI-based text recognition tool Transkribus will help search and summarize material, albeit with human oversight of the technology. “Everything still needs to be checked; We don’t trust it,” Ohlmeyer said.
Declan O’Sullivan, a professor at Trinity’s school of computing, expressed confidence that his department could turn data into knowledge easily accessible to the public and researchers.
The period 1500-1700 represented a transition from medieval to modern and coincided with the expansion of the English empire, said Ohlmeyer, author of Making the Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World.
“Starting in the late 16th century, colonialism really intensified and gained tremendous momentum, especially on the plantations. “That is when we see Ireland becoming English through language, law and socio-economic infrastructure.”
The civil wars created opportunities for women who, in the absence of men, became breadwinners and ran businesses such as breweries, moneylenders, tanners, and tavernkeepers.
Catherine Strong, after being accused of presiding over the “filth of the streets,” appeared as a creditor in the Dublin basic statute.
However, the conflicts also caused horrors. Depositions taken after the Catholic uprising of 1641 showed widespread robberies, assaults and rapes that were often euphemized as “stripping,” Ohlmeyer said.
In a statement, Amy Manfin, a Protestant settler, said she was forced to stand in the blood of her murdered husband before being stripped naked and dragged by her hair among thorns. The English government forces were just as brutal.
Other documents show women pursuing legal cases. In a battle with a debtor over a contested will, Joan Flynn allegedly tricked the Dublin probate court in 1599 into granting him power over the estate of her late husband.