2016-2017

WW1 'agony aunt' letters found by Teesside University

The Dear Mrs Pennyman project is inspired by letters written to Mary Pennyman who was Secretary of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB) Widows and Orphan Fund. They are from women whose husbands, sons and brothers had been killed in action during the First World War. Over one hundred letters were found at Ormesby Hall in Middlesbrough where Mary Pennyman’s husband’s family had lived for nearly 400 years.

The aim of the project is to discover more about the women who wrote the letters and to increase our understanding of what shaped women’s lives in the years during and after the war.

Dear Mrs Pennyman is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

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Currently, the staff of the FNG project are compiling an archive of texts from the period 1882-2000. The archive will include published and unpublished material, material reflecting the spoken word, and material from folklore. Texts from this archive will be made available to scholars online as the work progresses. This archive will be used to compile a corpus of texts, and that, along with Corpas na Gaeilge 1600-1882, will be used to start work on the historical language dictionary.

Faoi láthair, tá foireann FNG ag obair ar aircív a thiomsú de théacsanna a bhaineann leis an tréimhse 1882-2000. San áireamh beidh ábhar foilsithe agus neamhfhoilsithe, ábhar ón bhfocal labhartha agus ón mbéaloideas. Beidh ábhar ón aircív seo ar fáil do scoláirí ar líne de réir a chéile. Bainfear úsáid as an aircív seo le corpas a chur le chéile, agus bainfear úsáid as, in éineacht le Corpas na Gaeilge 1600-1882 a foilsíodh sa bhliain 2004, le tabhairt faoin bhfoclóir stairiúil a chur le chéile.

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The project team brings together a team from Queen’s University, St Mary’s College, Féile an Phobail and the West Belfast community in a collaborative project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (www.ahrc.ac.uk), and it looks specifically at the ethics of cultural translation in urban festivals. The project has been funded within the AHRC’s Translating Cultures scheme. See www.TranslatingCultures.org for details of events and activities associated with projects funded under this scheme. 

The Mourne Mountains Landscape Partnership (MMLP) is a Heritage Lottery funded programme that targets funding at a wide range of heritage projects, many of which draw on local creativity to celebrate the special landscape in which we live and work.  For further information on our work, please refer to http://www.mournelive.com/landscape-partnership or www.facebook.com/mournelive.

As part of this programme of activity, we propose to organise a number of open days to assist in the compilation of an archive of old images relating specifically to the themes identified by the Landscape Partnership (eg Mourne Granite, the collection of water, traditional skills etc).  The photographs would be scanned using a high specification scanner and a digital copy made.  A caption to accompany the image would be recorded to provide the viewer with some basic information about what was being done, who was in the photograph when it was taken etc. These images would be categorised and made available to the wider community via the use of the internet.  Members of the community would also be invited to bring along relevant artefacts so that a digital image may be taken.  

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The Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis has worked with National Museums Northern Ireland (NMNI) for more than 10 years on a variety of projects from the scanning and transcription of Day Books, the digitisation of historical photographs, the scanning of oversized shipbuilding plans and more. Initially our collaboration focussed on individual bespoke discrete projects. More recently the key strategic nature of our relationship has been recognised through a two-year contract formalising the Centre as NMNI’s digitisation partner allowing us to work on a range of projects without the need for individual tendering. Various projects include:-

• Experimental ways of incorporating museum objects using Geographical Information System technology to place objects in their spatial context and search for objects spatially.
• Digitisation and Transcription of Museum Accession Records from 1989-1999, we have previously completed same for 1960-1988.  This involved Indexing content, supplying a Unique ID and incorporating NMNI file information. Image scanning each record @ 300 dpi 8 Bit, individually post-processing each record and transcribing handwriting into an agreed Excel format. Metadata and Technical information was also supplied for each file created.

Seminal to our work with NMNI is the Centre’s hosting of the School of Geography, Archaeology and Paleoecology’s MSc in Digital Heritage Science which provides a grounded training in the use of innovative digital techniques in the museum sector amongst others and our extensive experience in GIS, metadata development and Digital Humanities.

This database is an online collection of the objects and stories which we have gathered and digitised during the course of our public engagement workshops and events. The database holds digital copies of items such as medals, letters, postcards, service records and other memorabilia relating to World War One. The items belong to relatives of those involved in the war, and interested collectors, who wish to conserve the memory and legacy of the objects by having them digitised.

The database will exist for the life of the Living Legacies 1914-18 project and its primary function is to collate the content from various roadshows and provide a collection, from which our academics and project partners can consider addressing research questions.

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