A Family at War: Mary Martin’s Diary, 1 January – 25 May 1916

  • Host: Trinity College Dublin
  • URL: http://dh.tcd.ie/martindiary/
  • Main language: English
  • Other institutions involved: The National Library of Ireland

General description: A Family at War: Mary Martin’s Diary, 1 January – 25 May 1916 is an online exhibition of the Diary of Mary Martin, a widow and mother of twelve children, living in the affluent Dublin suburb of Monkstown. Mary wrote the diary to her son Charlie, a soldier with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who went missing in action on the Salonika front, in the hope that one day he would return home and be able to read it. Set against the backdrop of the Easter Rising and the First World War, the diary chronicles the daily activities of Mary, her family, friends and relatives.

Created by students enrolled in the Digital Scholarly Editing module on the MPhil in Digital Humanities and Culture and PhD in Digital Arts and Humanities (DAH) taught by Susan Schreibman, Trinity College Dublin, Spring 2012, this online exhibition is a fascinating source for anyone interested in Irish history, military history, women’s history and genealogy.

Implementation description: The Mary Martin diary is part of the collection of the National Library of Ireland (NLI). The goal of this project is to transcribe and encode the digitised pages of the diary and then to digitally exhibit the project on TCD servers. The purpose of the project is to allow increased access to the diaries for a general audience interested in the social and military aspects of Ireland in 1916. As this project entails working with the framework of the Diary of Robert Graves 1935-39 website, the encoding has been tailored to align itself with their TEI tags as far as is possible. The header mirrors for the most part the header of the Diary of Robert Graves 1935-39 project. The TEI P4 rules utilised by the Graves project are used as is their DTD. The header contains the catalogue information from the NLI for the Mary Martin diary, the name of the encoder and transcriber of that monthly entry, the availability information for the digital object as detailed by the NLI.

Copyright information: http://www.nli.ie/en/rights-and-reproductions.aspx

Contact:

Susan Schreibman

Long Room Hub Associate Professor in Digital Humanities

School of English

Trinity College

Dublin 2

Tel: +353 1 896 3694

Fax: +353 1 671 7114

Email: susan.schreibman@tcd.ie