Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In this paper I discuss issues relating to a Digital Humanities archive of photographs of the murals of Northern Ireland that I have constructed since 2005 (available at http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/mni). Consisting of some 20,000 photographs that I have taken from 1979-the present, the archive stands as an important source for the visual history of the conflict and post-conflict periods in Northern Ireland. The open-access archive is fully downloadable and each image is accompanied by historical contextualisation - date, place, affiliation, and description. My paper discusses the advantages that the digitisation of the archive offers for research, and also considers the skills that are required in order to make sense of the materials that the archive makes accessible. I argue that although the new technologies transform our access to materials, in the case of the Northern Irish murals, it turns out that traditional skills in the humanities - contextual knowledge, evidence-based interpretation, analytical judgment, and critical thinking - are required in order to allow us to understand the historical significance of the images under consideration.