An online collection of primary texts and scholarly articles focusing on Irish-Americans in the American West.

With a few notable exceptions, the study of Irish-America has been biased by a focus on Irish-Americans in urban settings east of the Mississippi, a bias that has resulted in a rather warped interpretation of the whole Irish-American experience. This project is aimed at countering this bias by producing a rigorous and expandable collection of scholarly materials (researched essays, bibliographies, biographies, histories, etc.) that draw their subjects from an electronic collection of rare and out of print Irish-American literary, cultural, and historical texts from the American West. The two principal goals of this project are (A) to bring the wealth of western Irish-American literary and historical writing to the Internet in a scholarly project and (B) to counter the existing bias in Irish-American scholarship, by providing an online collection of primary source material and scholarly articles devoted to exploring the works of western Irish-Americans.

The heart of the project is the electronic text archive consisting of rare and out-of-print works of Irish-American writing from western America including, but not necessarily limited to, works of fiction, drama, poetry, journalism, biography, nonfiction, and commentary. The electronic text collection provides the basis and subject matter for the specifically research-orientated component of the project, which is a constantly growing collection of scholarly works investigating the texts archived in the collection. One of the many unique and valuable features of this project is that the academic essays published in the online collection are "hyper-linked" to the primary texts in the archive. The result of this linkage allows readers to immediately access the scholar's primary source material. The overall aim of the project is, thus, to provide both access to and scholarly interpretation of the material, thus, providing readers with both first-hand experience (through the primary texts) and scholarly insight (through the research-based articles).

In addition to providing access and interpretation, the texts at the heart of the project are viewable over the Internet in HTML and will also be (as the project progresses) available for download in encoded form (according to the Text Encoding Initiative [TEI] standards). The process developed by the IAW project team converts styled Microsoft Word files into well-formed, valid XML files. The process automates all XML tagging and simplifies the editing of texts in preparation for database archiving. Past encoding projects have had to rely on training project editors (usually students) in eXtensible Markup Language. As students graduate and move on, encoding projects frequently have to invest time and energy into training new interns. Also problematic is the potential for human error inherent in any hand-coding. The process developed by the IAW team is such that text editors need only be familiar with MS Word. A one page set of guidelines for editing texts provides all the necessary information and there is virtually no training. Once the files are proof read and edited, they are run through a computer process that, in a matter of minutes converts a 300 page MS Word manuscript into well-formed and valid XML. The process involves the use of several open source applications and a custom made XSL Transformation that was designed to produce XML compliant with the appropriate TEI Document Type Definition. Where appropriate materials in the collection are hyperlinked to other resources outside of the collection. With such additions, the archive of digital texts is more than simply a "warehouse" of primary materials, being instead a project of scholarly import and pedagogical use as well.

Core personnel:

• Matthew Jockers (Consulting Assistant Professor and Academic Technology Specialist in English, Stanford)
• Glen Worthey (Digital Humanities Librarian, Green Library, Stanford)

Visit the project website at the Western Institute for Irish Studies
Visit the Irish-American Literature class website (English 139E)

Read about the Summer 2003 conferences