VICTEUR: European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture is a 5-year project funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. The study will use big data to address a key unanswered societal question, how does migration impact on the cultural identity of both migrant and host communities in the historical long-term.
Victorian Britain was much more diverse than we assume today. It was the target destination for large numbers of migrants from across Europe fleeing war, political turmoil and economic deprivation.
Professor Gerardine Meaney
Principal Investigator
What is VICTEUR?
The VICTEUR study will combine data analytics and literary criticism to investigate representations of migrants and by migrants in Victorian fiction.
VICTEUR: European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant of €2.5 million for a study focused on migration and culture.
The 5-year study, led by Principal Investigator Professor Gerardine Meaney, will involve text analysis of nearly 36,000 books, in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus, and shared by them in digital format with the research team.
The Advanced Grant will also result in the establishment of 10 new research positions (PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, a research technologist and a research assistant) at UCD.
Dr Derek Greene, an Assistant Professor in the UCD School of Computer Science, and an expert in the field of machine learning, is collaborating with Professor Meaney on this study. Dr Greene is also a Funded Investigator at the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics at UCD, which will provide computational support for the project.
“As part of this study, we will apply text mining methods to study a corpus consisting of nearly 36,000 digitised books from the British Library, using UCD’s Curatr natural language processing platform. Based on these analyses, the project will then trace the residual impact of these cultural representations in modern neo-Victorian fiction, film, and television, by combining methodologies from data science, digital humanities, and cultural memory studies.”
Dr Derek Greene
Project Collaborator
VICTEUR in numbers
Creation of 10 research positions – PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, a research technologist and a research assistant – at UCD.
VICTEUR will involve text analysis of nearly 36,000 books, in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus, and shared by them in digital format.
The project has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant of €2.5 million for a 5-year study.
The VICTEUR team
VICTEUR’S research team combines UCD’s strengths in cultural criticism and social network analysis, traditional humanities and new computational approaches, established and early stage researchers.
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