Exploring the Irish Annals

The Irish annals are a collection of texts recording historical events in medieval Ireland, spanning pre-history down to the seventeenth century.

Between them, the annals preserve information on many thousands of events, providing an extremely rich picture of the social, political, and cultural life of all parts of medieval Ireland.

Although many of the texts have been digitised at the CELT project in UCC, they are still difficult to access and explore, not least because of the sheer volume of information they contain.

Annals Explorer is a prototype project that applies AI, Data Science, and knowledge graph techniques to a selection of entries from the Annals of Ulster covering the years 600 to 700 CE.

The project involved using Natural Language Processing to build a knowledge graph, that is, a structured representation of entities (people, places, events) mentioned in the annals and the relationships between them.

The aim of the project was to demonstrate the potential of Data Science to facilitate easier and deeper exploration of historical Irish texts.