IRELAND
Irish Times

September 6, 2018

By Olive Keogh

New fields are benefiting from a dynamic search function that allows for an astonishing level of specific detail

The emerging field of digital humanities is the latest discipline to benefit from big data analysis and in an unusual arts-Stem collaboration, academics at UCD have used it to reveal new insights into the 2009 Ryan report on institutional child abuse.

The cross-disciplinary team behind Industrial Memories are Emilie Pine, associate professor of modern drama at UCD, Prof Mark Keane of UCD’s insight centre for data analytics, and research fellow Susan Leavy who began work on the project in 2015. In Emilie Pine’s view, the Ryan report is “probably the most important publication in the history of the State, yet we’re not reading it. A lot of the material is witness testimony in the form of letters, diaries, memos…