Irish annals project (pilot)

Thanks to CELT and the individuals who diligently transcribed the available texts and encoded them in TEI XML, many or most of the essential collections of Irish annals can be consulted online. Although the editions, some with English translations, have been around for quite a while, they provide interesting opportunities that are still left untapped today. One of these is the ability for users to cross-check records from the available texts and provide additional tools to search them. A pilot is proposed that will focus on a narrow period of Irish history (804 to maybe 820) to start addressing.

Project category

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Sources used

For the current period selected, the following sources are relevant.

Chronicon Scotorum
Annals of Ulster
Annals of Inisfallen
Annals of the Four Masters (edition and translation)
Additional sources:
- Annals of Boyle
- Cottonian annals
- Short Annals of Armagh - contains some relevant entries

While the following sources are relevant, TEI XML editions are not available.

MB/Annals of Clonmacnoise, although I made a humble start
Annals of Roscrea

In their present state, the Annals of Tigernach and Fragmentary Annals do not have entries for this period.

Outline of the intended approach

Records

Separate database entries will be created that align, as far as possible, the available records for each documented event or event group. Properties should cover:

Scholarly, 'restored' date, e.g. 804 where AU has 803 and AFM has 799.
Feria (kalends only)
A label (undecided). Example: "804.2 (Domnall)"
A summary. The summary can be used to highlight some of the more significant variants but should not be relied on to provide a perfectly balanced synopsis. This is what the sources cited are for.
A unique identifier for each TEI XML edition and translation. Fortunately for us, CELT adopted a forward-looking editorial policy by providing each annalistic record with a unique ID (xml:id) or number (n).
Broad event/record categories that are yet to be decided: e.g. kalends, deaths (non-specific), violent deaths, violent conflicts (battles, harryings, etc.), accessions, synods, promulgation of law, climate and weather phenomena, marvels, movements of relics, etc. It may be helpful to have a look at PASE.
Entities mentioned - even if the annals are not equally (in)complete and do not necessarily agree with each other
- Persons
- Peoples
- Places
Accompanying verse items (if any)
Cross-references (to earlier events)
Historical layers? Or features that are potentially relevant?
- The earliest sets of annals are thought to share a common core that goes back to an earlier compilation, although many questions remain and different theories have been proposed, with no real consensus in sight. We should tread carefully, but can we offer anything to make distinctions.
- Additions in later hands can be marked as such.

Wikibase

The database to be used is our instance of Wikibase Cloud. This should help to reconcile entities with authority records, etc.

MediaWiki and TEI XML

The CETEIcean extension will be used to select and extract the relevant portions of the annals.

Issues to be addressed

We should be able to identify the annal under which a particular record was entered. The easiest solution may lie in the identifier itself: if we have an ID like 'U805.3', then 'U805.0' should contain our kalends. Note there is one exception to this in CS, because CS is lacunose and lacks the beginning of the annal.
There is not always an easy to resolve, one-to-one relationship between the various accounts in the annals, or at least, in the way 'records' are distinguished in our source documents. In practice, this means that there are cases when an XML ID is assigned to multiple DB entries, or that we will have to point to two or more XML IDs. It may not be easy to apply hard and fast rules, but these examples may give some guidance:
- In general, I'm inclined to give more weight to the earlier sources than, say, AFM, in which the compilers might have seen reason to rearrange their source material.
- Two events may be grouped together in one source, while another mentions only the first one. In this case, I'm inclined to respect the grouping of the former (as opposed to creating two separate database entries), especially if the source is comparatively early.
- Two events may be grouped together in one source, while another keeps them distinct. Same as above?
- The annals can be out of sync in the sense that a record may end up under a previous or subsequent annal. An example is the obit of Toicthech, abbot of Armagh.