Singing Places: interdisciplinary approaches to the history and heritage of the Ordnance Survey

Presenters: Members of the OS200 team and the Traditional
Music as Cultural Heritage TradSong cluster at the Irish
World Academy

Co-Chairs: Dr Catherine Porter and Dr Niamh NicGhabhann

This seminar brings together researchers exploring ideas of
place, the histories and heritages of landscapes, and placenames
from across disciplines. It connects the ongoing OS200 project
with the TradSong (Traditional Song as Cultural Heritage)
research cluster at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance.
The OS200 project is a 3-year project which is jointly funded by
the Irish Research Council (IRC) and the Arts and Humanities
Research Council (AHRC), part of a €6.5m programme of
research bringing together world-leading expertise in the
digital humanities across the UK and Ireland. The OS200 team is led in UL by Dr Catherine Porter, Head of Geography in the
Department of History, with Dr Zenobie Garrett as the project
postdoctoral researcher. Dr Aengus Finnigan and Dr Niamh
NicGhabhann are UL project co-investigators. The project is a
partnership with Queen’s University Belfast, with a team led by
Professor Keith Lilley, with Dr Frances Kane, Professor Professor
Mícheál Ó Mainnín, Dr Rebecca Milligan, and Professor Paul Ell
as co-investigators and project researchers.

The project aims to gather historic Ordnance Survey (OS) maps
and texts to form a single freely accessible online resource for
academic and public use. This digital platform will reconnect the
First Edition Six-Inch Maps with the OS Memoirs, Letters and
Name Books and in doing so will enable a team of researchers
from across Ireland – north and south – to uncover otherwise
hidden and forgotten aspects of the life and work of those
employed by the OS as they mapped and recorded landscapes
and localities. It involves close collaboration with key partners
at the Royal Irish Academy, the National Library of Ireland, the
Digital Repository of Ireland, and the Public Records Office of
Northern Ireland.

This seminar will be a series of interdisciplinary encounters,
bringing together recent scholarship on song and placenames
from the Irish World Academy on George Petrie who connected
the worlds of song-collecting and mapping, and on the history of
the Ordnance Survey itself.

Full details of the OS200 project can be found here:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7cedc565e15e4ba58444f9eaf435d1de

The seminar will be followed by a singing circle, and audience
members and members of the public are invited to come to share
songs connected to place and place names. Details of the singing
circle to be confirmed.