Digital Humanities: Emory Digital Scholarship Center Launches Belfast Group Poetry Networks Interactive Resource

The following resource went live earlier this month and includes a number of data visualization tools.
From Emory University in Atlanta:

A new website called Belfast Group Poetry Networks will make it easier to understand the connections between Irish writers, particularly members of the mid-1960s Belfast Group, using open-source software created by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS).
Belfast Group Poetry Networks provides an interactive way to explore the poets’ literary and social networks, based on correspondence, shared poems at workshops, and mentions of names and places in poems and throughout their personal papers.
The new site builds on and extends the previous Belfast Group webpage, created in 2000 by the Lewis H. Beck Center for Electronic Collections (now part of ECDS), as well as EmoryFindingAids, a repository of collection descriptions for MARBL (Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library) manuscript collections.
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The project for the Beck Center’s original Belfast Group website began in the mid-1990s, when a small number of poets whose papers are held by MARBL gave permission for their Group sheets to be digitized to create an electronic poetry collection.
The updated site features the Group sheets of poets who gave permission, which include Heaney, Muldoon, Michael Longley, Hobsbaum, Carson, Simmons, and Kennelly. The papers of one poet often contain Group sheets written by other poets.
Other features of the website include biographies of several Belfast Group members, generated from the MARBL finding aids (if MARBL doesn’t have the poet’s papers, the software will pull in the biography from Wikipedia); network graphs of the authors’ connections to the Belfast Group and to other writers; maps of places connected to people associated with the Belfast Group; and essays about both archival biases and women in the Belfast Group.

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The software [senior software engineer and project lead Rebecca Sutton] Koeser developed is open-source and can be used by other archives to show similar connections among their collections. Anne Donlon, a CLIR postdoctoral fellow in MARBL and ECDS, is using the software for preliminary work with MARBL’s African American collections to connect the writers who wrote, owned, or inscribed books to each other, Koeser says.

Resources

• Learn More, Read the Complete Announcement

• Direct to Belfast Group Poetry Networks Interactive Resource

Direct to Data Visualization Tools

• Networking the Belfast Group Project Web Page

• Finding Aids For Belfast Group Poets (via MARBL)

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, Journal Articles, Libraries, Maps, News, Open Access