Presenters: Members of the OS200 team and the Traditional Music as Cultural Heritage TradSong cluster at the Irish World Academy

Co-Chairs: Dr Catherine Porter and Dr Niamh NicGhabhann

This seminar brings together researchers exploring ideas of place, the histories and heritages of landscapes, and placenames from across disciplines. It connects the ongoing OS200 project with the TradSong (Traditional Song as Cultural Heritage) research cluster at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance.

The OS200 project is a 3-year project which is jointly funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of a €6.5m programme of research bringing together world-leading expertise in the digital humanities across the UK and Ireland. The OS200 team is led in UL by Dr Catherine Porter, Head of Geography in the Department of History, with Dr Zenobie Garrett as the project postdoctoral researcher. Dr Aengus Finnigan and Dr Niamh NicGhabhann are UL project co-investigators. The project is a partnership with Queen’s University Belfast, with a team led by Professor Keith Lilley, with Dr Frances Kane, Professor Professor Mícheál Ó Mainnín, Dr Rebecca Milligan, and Professor Paul Ell as co-investigators and project researchers.

The project aims to gather historic Ordnance Survey (OS) maps and texts to form a single freely accessible online resource for academic and public use. This digital platform will reconnect the First Edition Six-Inch Maps with the OS Memoirs, Letters and Name Books and in doing so will enable a team of researchers from across Ireland - north and south - to uncover otherwise hidden and forgotten aspects of the life and work of those employed by the OS as they mapped and recorded landscapes and localities. It involves close collaboration with key partners at the Royal Irish Academy, the National Library of Ireland, the Digital Repository of Ireland, and the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland.

This seminar will be a series of interdisciplinary encounters, bringing together recent scholarship on song and placenames from the Irish World Academy on George Petrie who connected the worlds of song-collecting and mapping, and on the history of the Ordnance Survey itself.

Full details of the OS200 project can be found here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7cedc565e15e4 ba58444f9eaf435d1de

The seminar will be followed by a singing circle, and audience members and members of the public are invited to come to share songs connected to place and placenames. Details of the singing circle to be confirmed