Scholars of medieval Welsh and Irish law frequently remark how the legal systems of these countries are neglected in larger studies of European legal history. While there are many reasons for this, including a lack of scholarly editions and secondary literature when compared with, for example, the early English laws, there has been a gradual shift over the last decade with more consideration being given to the laws as preserved from medieval Ireland and Wales. Part of this shift is the inclusion of articles on Welsh and Irish law in the Oxford Bibliographies in Legal History. Having essential resources available to scholars outside the field will increase the accessibility of this material to a wider audience. The creation of such a bibliography poses a series of challenges and opportunities which will form the basis of this talk.

This paper will discuss the manuscripts and texts of Cyfraith Hywel, the law of medieval Wales. The subject area is manuscript-heavy and is dependent on texts to a great extent, but the paper will discuss the state of the field: accessibility of the manuscripts, with a full historiographical background. It will consider manuscripts and texts which have been neglected, and why this is the case, as well as discuss work which needs to be done in order to make the subject area and the texts fully accessible to scholars of the laws and also academics working in adjacent fields.

The electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL) is the principal lexicographical resource for medieval Irish. Although originally conceived as a historical dictionary, its structure provides relatively limited chronological information about the texts from which lexical evidence is drawn. The team’s recent work on eDIL has sought to address this limitation by systematically identifying, dating, and describing the primary textual sources underlying dictionary citations.

This paper will describe the historical evolution and capability of eDIL, along with the methodology employed in constructing the new chronological framework. A series of case studies will show how the recently added chronological evidence can illuminate semantic change, lexical innovation, borrowing, and the development of individual words and meanings across the history of the language. The paper will include a demonstration of the timeline visualisations that will accompany each word and provide an overall impression of a its chronology. It will also demonstrate the new bibliographical apparatus which now includes a discussion of the dates of individual textual sources. It is hoped that these new features will enable the exploration of linguistic developments that were previously difficult to identify.

The paper will also consider future directions for eDIL following completion of the current project and a planned move to a new hosting service in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. This will be followed by a discussion on the further development of the resource and the integration of new features and content.

What does it mean for a Celtic text to be “accessible”? This paper argues that the digitisation and preservation of Celtic textual heritage have not eliminated barriers to access but redistributed them across languages, technologies, institutions, and scholarly practices. Bringing Old Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Breton into conversation, I examine three different textual conditions: the medieval manuscript transformed into a searchable digital object; the performed Gaelic text transformed from voice and communal memory into recording, transcription, and metadata; and Breton vernacular materials whose archival lives remain entangled with community-based practices of preservation, revitalisation, and circulation.

I begin from a deceptively simple problem: a text may be physically available without being meaningfully accessible. An Old Irish manuscript may be digitised yet remain opaque without palaeographical and linguistic expertise; a Scottish Gaelic song may be preserved as an audio file while its performance, locality, and social context become difficult to recover; a Breton text may be catalogued and translated while its continuing significance depends upon communities whose knowledge exceeds the archive’s classificatory structures. Accessibility, therefore, is not the absence of mediation but its accumulation.

Drawing upon digital archives, manuscript editions, oral-text collections, translations, and community-oriented resources, I trace the movement of Celtic texts through successive infrastructures, manuscript, edition, recording, transcription, translation, database, and digital circulation. Particular attention is given to the often-overlooked labour of independent scholars, translators, community researchers, and volunteer contributors who connect institutional repositories with linguistic and cultural communities.

I argue that the Celtic archive should be understood not as a completed repository but as an unfinished process of interpretation, contextualisation, translation, and recirculation. By foregrounding uneven access rather than technological preservation alone, the paper asks who is enabled to read, hear, interpret, and participate in Celtic textual worlds, and whose knowledge remains structurally difficult to retrieve. Ultimately, it proposes that sustainable Celtic textual infrastructures must preserve not only texts, but also the human relationships and forms of expertise through which those texts continue to become meaningful.

This talk examines aspects of the digitization of and subsequent access to the Milan Glosses, our largest source of Old Irish in a contemporary manuscript. In the first, backwards-looking part of the talk I explore the steps and missteps involved in digitizing the text of the Milan Glosses, as well as of the Psalm commentary that they gloss. All of this work was part of the Milan Glosses Project (funded by FWF – Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung – project number P19137-G03), which ran from 2006 to 2011. The digitization included creating MS word, and then PDF, files of the gloss text as found in Stokes & Strachan (1901: 7–483). These files were simply digital versions of the older text. More important digitization work was done through the medium of Filemaker Pro, with which a new digital edition of the text was created with full morphological parsing and an accompanying dictionary. Accessibility was achieved through a stand-alone version of the digital database.

While much of the digitization work, originally performed 15–20 years ago, led to increased accessibility of the text in both the short- and medium-term, not all aspects have fared equally well up to the present. The second part of the talk focusses on the issues that have arisen in accessibility in the last five years. Much of these are the result of the well-known problems arising from using proprietary software (e.g. Filemaker Pro). I do not have quick-and-easy solutions to all of these problems. Nonetheless, through this conference I hope to embed the issues arising around the digitization of the Milan Glosses in the broader discussion surrounding text accessibility.

This presentation focuses on léamh.org (Léamh), an open-access  web-based, collaborative project that aims to assist people wishing to read the Irish language as it was written c. 1200-1650. In the absence of accessible (and in some respects, any) learning materials – grammar, dictionary and guide – the acquisition of Early Modern Irish has always been difficult, especially for those not resident in Ireland or the UK. Léamh was begun to help address that absence and its consequent challenges to language acquisition by offering guided translations of a wide range of texts and genres, a grammar with basic paradigms and descriptive summaries, and a searchable reference glossary. The site expanded to offer tutelage in reading manuscripts through means of a stand-alone guide to paleography. Originally envisioned as a tool for scholars working in fields outside Irish/Celtic who wished to access original sources, the site is in fact aimed at a global audience of learners, regardless of their relationship to the academy.

Léamh is very much concerned with community building and collaboration. In addition to fostering learning and aiding research, it provides a platform for original work, both in matters linguistic and technical. Those who do the linguistic analyses are credited and get a peer-reviewed online publication; those who work on the technical side have also contributed original work to the site which is helpful for their professional development. Not only does the project bring scholars and technologists together to create the site and its features, it also partners with other digital sites and traditional publishers concerned with Irish language, history, and letters.

This presentation will cover the workings and philosophy of the site, and offer thoughts on successes, challenges, and next steps for its development.

While many secondary texts in Celtic Studies are digitised and available online, poor quality optical character recognition of Celtic languages results limits their accessibility. Searches for specific language terms result in few – or even zero – hits due to recognition errors, and corpus linguistic techniques are impossible to apply without full scale transcription efforts. 

Many modern off-the-shelf digitisation programs offer medieval language support for languages such as Latin and Old English, or modern dictionaries of Breton, Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. However, for the reader of their medieval equivalents, there is little available.

This paper discusses a low-cost ‘ensemble-OCR’ approach to digitising Old and Middle Irish law texts, adaptable to other medieval Celtic languages and genres with few linguistic resources.  An ensemble OCR approach uses two or more OCR programs to produce text transcriptions, then compares the two transcriptions to identify potential errors. The comparison can be augmented through a range of techniques, including voting or weighted models, and the analysis and application of systemic errors unique to each program. AI support was employed to develop bespoke coding scripts that identified and corrected errors, and tools to compare images with transcripts for human-in-the loop review. 

I will discuss the many lessons learned from challenges that arose in each stage of the project, including generating and selecting images, setting up OCR engines for an ensemble approach, analysis and quality assurance of the final product. I will share what worked (and more importantly: what didn’t), highlight opportunities for further improvement, and share some of the project resources with the research community. 

The Pacific Ocean is about as far as you can physically get from the Celtic-speaking regions of Western Europe, but even here these languages do have a presence, even if it is somewhat limited. Colonial legacies in countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and Argentina, mean that there are significant groups with cultural and genetic ties to Celtic homelands (some of whom have proficiency at some level in a Celtic language), while in nations like Japan, Celtic languages can be an academic pursuit or simply something of personal interest. For the majority of people in all these places, the acquisition is as a second language, not as a mother tongue, for which access is needed to teachers, classes, and learning materials. To develop an understanding of the current state of Celtic language learning and teaching across the Pacific region, this paper will examine some of the available data and statistics, explore the existence of formal and informal language-learning opportunities, and sample the accessibility of physical Celtic media through a case study on bookshops and libraries in Sydney, Australia.

As a lecturer in Celtic Studies, I sometimes feel like a record that has gotten stuck in a particular groove. This groove has me repeatedly telling students how much work is still to be done in the field, how many texts lie unedited, and how many edited texts are either unavailable or outdated. In an attempt to pop the needle out of this groove, I decided to start an experiment in our Irish palaeography course. 

While introducing the art of reading and transcribing National Gaelic Minuscule, I also introduced the art of marking up these transcriptions into XML, following Marjorie Burghart’s Creating a Digital Scholarly Edition with the Text Encoding Initiative and her MOOC on the topic. For the final assignment, students create in small groups a new digital edition of a previously unedited section of a manuscript, which is then presented on our website. 

While students often feel they have been thrown in the deep end, this approach has had multiple benefits, such as the ownership it gives the students of their learning process and the new material that it has unearthed. It also has its drawbacks, among which is the use of a perhaps hopelessly outdated mark-up language in a fast-developing digital world and the increase in teacher work-load. In this talk, I will reflect on the benefits, limitations, and desiderata that have followed from this experiment. 

Old Irish texts were composed, written and copied by individuals possessing an intimate familiarity with the material environment in which they lived, extending notably to textiles and items of dress. This form of material culture features heavily in descriptions of people as well as within legal texts; in matters of character, currency and tribute, the details matter. However, various words are translated into simple terms such as “tunic”, “cloak”, and any technique of decoration to “embroidery”, undercutting the significance of these textiles within their context, and further obscuring the richness of Irish textile manufacture and dress in the early medieval period for readers. This paper argues that material literacy gained through examination of archaeological textiles in combination with tacit knowledge from re-creative practice and experimental archaeology can be applied to aid the interpretation of such terminology in Old Irish.