Gender, Culture and Data

Gender, Culture and Data is a strategic initiative based at the UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics and bringing expertise from the ERC-funded VICTEUR project and the Insight Centre for Data Analytics. The project builds on established work in cultural analytics to investigate how gender, culture and data intersect, and how digital methods can reshape our understanding of Ireland’s literary and historical traditions. The project focuses in particular on the place of women in these narratives and how their contributions are recorded, represented and shared.

Drawing on data analysis, literary expertise and existing collections, the project enables new kinds of research. By unlocking data silos, such as diverse Irish biographical and historical datasets, it connects previously isolated sources and reveals richer, more inclusive patterns in our cultural record. This work combines the information from several key resources, including:

• Dictionary of Irish Biography: The Dictionary of Irish Biography is a comprehensive reference work published online by the Royal Irish Academy, containing detailed biographical entries on notable figures in Irish history, culture and public life.
• The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: These landmark volumes, published by Cork University Press, broaden the canon of Irish writing by foregrounding women’s voices and offering an extensive collection of texts across genres, periods and cultural contexts. Our focus is primarily on Volume 4 and Volume 5. The data comes from an OCR scan of the digitised edition created by JSTOR and Field Day.
• The Loeber Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650–1900: This major bibliographical reference work by Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber, with Anne M. Burnham, maps the landscape of Irish fiction over two and a half centuries, providing context for tracing authors, publications and literary networks. Further information is available from Four Courts Press. The digital version was developed as part of a project led by Prof. Margaret Kelleher at Maynooth University, funded by the Irish Research Council.
• A Database of Irish Women’s Writing, 1800-2005 (IWW): A digital resource dedicated to documenting the lives and works of Irish women writers, supporting research and teaching. The database was developed as part of a AHRC-funded project at the University of Warwick, directed by Prof. Maria Luddy and Prof. Gerardine Meaney.