Towards an Archive of the Future: Reconstructing Ireland's Lost History through the Beyond 2022 Project

Abstract

In 1922, the 'Record Treasury' of the Public Record Office of Ireland in Dublin was destroyed in the opening engagement of Ireland's Civil War. The Treasury contained millions of historical documents filling 100,000 square feet of shelving organised into 5,500 series of records accumulated over seven centuries. It was destroyed in one afternoon. Beyond 2022 is an international collaborative research project based at the ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, and funded by the Government of Ireland. We are working to create a virtual reimagining of this lost national archive. Many millions of words from destroyed documents will be linked and reassembled from copies, transcripts and other records scattered among the collections of our archival partners. We will bring together this rich array of replacement items within an immersive 3-D reconstruction of the destroyed building. In this keynote address, we will discuss the Digital Humanities and Knowledge Engineering challenges presented by the project, and also reflect on how this reimagining of a lost archive will provide deeper search and discoverability than was possible one hundred years ago when the archive was still in existence.