Note: I am currently undertaking a pilot project to make the Munster Women Writers Project available online again, using a sub-set of the data – writers born in, or associated with, Co Tipperary from 1800-2000.
A work-in-progress, it can be accessed here http://munsterwomenwriters.joanofarchives.com/home.
The map embedded below has been produced as part of an assignment for module DH6014, to produce a digital cultural resource.
You can also view the map as an online Neatline Exhibit running on the Omeka web publishing platform here.
Notes on the map
I have produced a spatial representation of a sub-set of data gathered by the Munster Women Writer’s Project. The original data-set was generated by Tina O’Toole (formerly UCC, now Dept of English, UL) and is used with permission of the copyright holder.
Reflections
My initial plan for this task was to create a map, identifying the locations within Co Tipperary associated with selected Munster Women Writers. Although I had geo-locational data from the MWW data-set it was not consistently formatted or structured and for this reason I had to do some data cleansing and filtering using Open Refine. I had then planned to use the map feature within Omeka to amend each entry with specific location data to produce a clickable map, however I found the level of detail and ability to present in a visually appealing manner to be very limited within the tool. For this reason I decided to use the Neatline Plugin for Omeka, to create a map exhibit. I began by re-importing all of the records, I then added and populated geo-locational fields for each entry. I also made the decision to add a reference to the Irish Placenames Database (logainm.ie) to each record, as I felt it might be useful to others accessing the data at a future date.
Geo-locational data
It was not possible to export the logainm data directly to Neatline as they had no import/export formats in common. Although logainm offers a number of export formats (JSON, XML, and linked data format RDF (via DRI)) Neatline is unable to parse these as it uses the WKT format. I was unable to find a tool to convert the data easily, although it is possible to do so using Python code. For the purposes of this assignment I decided to add the logainm permanent link to the body of each entry (in Neatline Biographical field). This made for a slow input of geo-locational information, as the Neatline tool contains no search function on the back-end (i.e. I was forced to scroll across map zoom in/out to find location that mapped directly to the logainm location for each record).
Suggestions for future work
- Colour code Irish vs English language writers
- Engage in further research to fact-check/confirm the key attributes such as dates, place of birth/association etc.
- Addition of publications post-2000 by writers with existing entries.
- Addition of writers born and/or published post-2000
Bibliography
“Neatline: Plugins & Modules.” n.d. Accessed February 28, 2022. https://neatline.org/plugins/.
“Online Access DB Opener.” n.d. Accessed February 28, 2022. https://www.mdbopener.com/.
“Omeka.” n.d. Accessed February 28, 2022. https://omeka.org/.
“OpenRefine.” n.d. Accessed February 28, 2022. https://openrefine.org/.
My name is Dympna Dreyer – I was very pleased to note that my name was mentioned among the tipperary writers you may be mentioning in your book. I have already been mentioned in theDictionary of Munster Women Writers 1800 – 2000. I had only one book to my name then but now I have 4.I will be 87 in May of this year.