This paper looks at some trends identifiable in the biographical data contained in the Ainm collection of Irish-language related biographies. The data structure is described and the reasons for its particular structure are outlined. The structured data is then analysed to identify some notable patterns and significant gaps in the Ainm biographical collection. These features and omissions are discussed in the context of the creation of both the original print biographical dictionary (the Beathaisnéis series) and the more recent digital version (www.ainm.ie).
The database evolved from, and now significantly expands,
the Beathaisnéis (‘biography’) series of published
biographies
The result to date is a collection of 1,756 biographies, with an average length of 1,223 words and 37 tags or crossreferences in each. 1,652 of these biographies are from the original series and 104 have been added since 2010. These biographies overlap with the much larger English-language Dictionary of Irish Biography1 (c.420 also feature there). The Ainm database is used widely, with an average of 1,143 searches per day (14/10/2018 - 05/03/19).
The biographical entries are stored as XML data (using
the SQL Server XML Data Type) in a relational database.
This allows us to store and modify the XML data in an
efficient and transacted way. It also allows us to
conveniently log changes and store versions of the
biographical entries. Each entry in the biographies table
comprises a unique ID, a text TITLE, and an XML
document. The ID field is a permanent unique identifier
within the database and can be used to access the
biography over the web in HTML2 or XML3 format. The
HTML is generated from the underlying XML using an
XSL transformation.
The original biographical entries digitised from
Beathaisnéis Volumes 1–9
The XML data follows the TEI: Text Encoding Initiative guidelines for the most part. In addition to the required <title/>, <forename/>, <surname/>, <birth/>, <death/> and <sex/> elements, <addName/>, <school/>, <university/> and <occupation/> are included as metadata in the <header/> element, where known. These metadata are displayed in the biography title and infobox on the public website.4 The dates are also used on the timeline5 and thematic tag cloud6 tools.
In addition to (biographical) entry level metadata contained in the header, certain entity types have been tagged inline in the biography <text/> element. These include placenames (<placeName/>), publications (<opus/>), Gaelic League branches (<conradh/>), educational institutions (<eduInst/>) and political parties (<party/>). This information is used to create the aforementioned tag clouds. Placename tags include a reference to the Placename Database of Ireland7 where the place is in Ireland and a reference to GeoNames8 where the place is outside of Ireland. People (<persName>) are also tagged in the <text/> element. People tags include a cross-reference where the person is within the database. A <bibliography/> element is included after the <text/> element in some of the newer biographies.
For the original collection of biographies, all inline tagging
(i.e. markup of named entities in the body text of the
biographical entry) was done automatically using a
purpose-built tagger written in Python. The tagger searched
for and tagged named entities (i.e. names, placenames,
publications, institutions, and political parties). The tagger
included a custom NLP function to deal with initial
mutation (e.g. gCorcaigh) of entities in the Irish-language
text. This function tagged the mutated entity and inserted
the base form (e.g. Corcaigh) as an attribute of the entity.
All inline tagging was subsequently manually checked.
Newer biographies are tagged manually. Older biographies
are gradually being re-checked as they are prepared for use
as “biography of the week” on Twitter, Facebook and in the
project newsletter. User feedback is also considered.
The Beathaisnéis collection (on which the Ainm database
is primarily based) is the result of the passionate work of
two committed amateur biographers. One of the challenges
this poses for the creation of standardised metadata is that
the original authors did not complete profile sheets or index
6 www.ainm.ie/Tags.aspx
7 www.logainm.ie
8 www.geonames.org
cards such as those commonly used by other dictionaries of
national biography
The digitisation of biographical collections offers the
opportunity to examine collections at a scale not previously
possible when only utilizing biographical text. With the
creation and linking of standardised datasets from
unstructured text, the overall contents of the collection can
be revealed and trends can be analysed. The Finnish
BiographySampo9
Likewise, most common years of death in ODNB not only
reflect periods of illness or bloodshed, but also the inherent
biases contributors brought in with their selection of
subjects:
“The local peaks in 1883 and 1908... once again
remind us to attend to the data infrastructure.
Rather than marking some hitherto unknown
plague afflicting the Victorian aristocracy, 1883
marks the point at which contemporaneous deaths
ceased to be meaningful to Stephen, his deputy
Sidney Lee, and their collaborators.”
The image of the nation captured in the pages of the ODNB
is less a reflection of the nation’s history than of the making
of the dictionary itself
Magnus Ó Domhnaill (c.1490-1563) is the earliest-born in
the collection, with 2017 the most recent year of death.
Spanning seven different centuries, there are 306 different
years of birth. An interesting demographic is revealed when
we analyse the years of birth and death on a broader range.
The most significant is the fact that 815 people were born
in the 19th century, 46% of the lives. If we add in those
who were born in the 20th century, 514 people, we reach
1329 lives, 75% of the total collection. Furthermore, 1064
people died in the 20th century, 62% of the total. Therefore,
having been born in the 19th century, and having died in
the 20th century, the majority of lives lived through the
revival period of Irish, something which comes in line with
the understanding that the Beathaisnéis project initially
centred around those most active in reviving the language
during the late 19th and early 20th century. There are
however 110 people with no year of birth or year of death
stored as metadata. (In most cases, these lives were in the
form of short ‘stub’ articles by the Beathaisnéis authors,
where birth and death dates were not included in the title
and therefore not automatically extracted. This is an area
for future improvement. Having identified this gap, we will
begin manually extracting available missing data in order
to store it accordingly.)
other international biographical databases
A connection to the Irish language is the primary condition for inclusion in the collection, yet 20 different countries are represented in the database. Ireland (including Northern Ireland) is the top represented country with 1,217 people. England is next on the list with 63. Germany, Scotland and the United States are next, each with 15. The other countries represented in the database are India, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, Wales, France, the Netherlands, Australia, Denmark, Malta, Belgium, China, the Czech Republic and Japan. The total number of people born outside of Ireland is 140, or 8% of the collection. 399 people have no recorded place of birth stored as metadata. There are a number of very short biographies (134) which lack key biographical information and require further research. Filling this gap represents an area of future improvement for the project. It was not possible for the original authors to find records of a place of birth for some 103 lives from the 16th, 17th and 18th century. Each county in Ireland is represented in the collection (Figure 6), with Cork (the largest county by size) being the highest represented county with 197 people, or 16% of those born in Ireland, and Fermanagh and Leitrim (both small counties) being the lowest represented counties with 3 lives each. The top six represented counties are Cork, Dublin, Galway, Kerry, Donegal and Waterford; all except Dublin contain an Irish language speaking area, or ‘Gaeltacht’. These counties represent 42% of the collection. The number of people born in England, 63, is higher than any of the other 26 counties. 12 Translation of extract from unpublished interview with Diarmuid Breathnach and Máire Ní Mhurchú, 2010. While each province is widely represented in the collection, Munster is the highest represented province with 534 lives (44% of those born in Ireland), almost double that of Leinster (280), followed by Connacht (210) and Ulster (193). The noticeable difference is something which has been previously alluded to by the original authors of the biographies. Although they made an effort not to neglect other areas (referring to Connacht and northern Leinster particularly), it is clear that there were more people of interest to them in Munster, due mainly to the historic strength of Irish in the province, particularly around the time of the revival period: ‘…there is a sort of nucleas or kernel of literacy, as you’d say, in Munster, and especially in Cork, and maybe part of Kerry as well. But, I saw figures from the time of the revival… seventy or eighty percent of the people reading the language were in Cork.’12 Diarmuid Breathnach also states his belief that ‘they had very good Irish, especially those from Cork and a lot of Munster people particularly.’13 Of the biographies published since 2013, 17% are from Munster. This reduced proportion may be attributed to the fact that the Irish-speaking community is no longer Munster-dominated, or to the bias of the Beathaisnéis authors.
A university education is recorded for 767 subjects; another 989 do not have metadata stored regarding university education and some of these were also university educated. Of those with available metadata, 40% of women (71) attained some form of university education, in comparison 13 Translation of extract from interview with Diarmuid Breathnach and Máire Ní Mhurchú, 2010, www.ainm.ie/Info.aspx?Topic=resources.en to 44% of men (696). University College Dublin (173) was the most commonly attended university of the database, followed by Trinity College Dublin (111), St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Dublin (71), National University of Ireland, Galway (69), St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth (61), and National University of Ireland, Cork (56). 45 attended either Oxford University, Cambridge or Harvard, but only 6 of these were born in Ireland. There are accounts of people attending university all across Europe, most notably universities in England, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Belgium. Of these, the Irish Colleges of Rome and Paris, and Leuven University, Belgium, appear more frequently than others. The preponderance of these religious institutions can be attributed to the large number of clergymen who travelled abroad for education during the period from the 16th to 18th centuries when this was prohibited to Catholics in Ireland.
Of the 1,756 lives, 1,690 have at least one occupation recorded, with ‘teacher’ being the most common profession, among both men and women, with a representation of 20% of men and 24% of women (21% total). This makes sense in the context of the central role the Irish language played, and continues to play, in the education system, however the original aims of the collection certainly influence this propensity towards education, given the necessarily central role of teachers in the revival of any language. Many of those involved with the Gaelic Revival spent time teaching Irish to others. There is a very high proportion of clergymen. There are 239 Catholic priests (bishops, archbishops, Christian brothers, Franciscans, Jesuits) and 42 Protestant ministers, which represents around 18% of men documented. In comparison, there are only two nuns, Mary Bonaventure Browne and Máire Treasa Ó Murchú, recorded in the collection. Most of those teachers and clergymen had a second occupation for which they were more recognised; clergymen were often professors. For both men and women, writers, scholars and poets complete the top five professions: being a published writer was one of the suggested criteria for inclusion in the collection.14 This preponderance of writers, and initial suggestion for their inclusion, also corresponds with the original focus on the Gaelic Revival, in which the construction of a modern, written literature in Irish played an important role. Other occupations to feature highly on the list include civil servants, musicians, singers and folklore collectors, politicians, lecturers, translators and editors; there are also 14 Unpublished interview with Diarmuid Breathnach and Máire Ní Mhurchú, 2010. lawyers, doctors, astronomers, actors, journalists, artists, engineers, miners, broadcasters, soldiers, and publishers. Priests, poets, and writers dominate the professions early in the 16th and 17th centuries. The 19th century (see Figure 7) sees a decline in poets, 70% of whom were born before the start of the Great Famine (1845); this can be attributed to the decline of the bardic poet tradition in Irish. The numbers of teachers, civil servants, politicians and translators begin to rise around the same time. The end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century also sees a rise in folklore, music, and song collectors, no doubt due to the desire to recuperate all that was lost in the previous century of famine, emigration and political unrest.
The Ainm example highlights some issues which confront digitisers of biographical dictionaries: omissions or unstructured data in original material, and text which is not easily tagged. These issues are still being addressed by the editorial team.
The preponderance of 19th and 20th century lives in Ainm
is a reflection of the original editorial aims, rather than of
the most important era for the Irish language, which had
begun to decline as a literary and administrative language
long before then. Quantitative analysis can be used to
confirm the authors’ acknowledged bias towards certain
regions (Munster) and professions (writers), as well as the
usual gender disparity. As
The Ainm project is a partnership between Cló IarChonnacht, an Irish-language specialist publisher that holds the copyright to the material, and the Gaois research group in Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge, Dublin City University, who developed and maintain the database. Funding for the project is provided by the Irish Government.