Project blog
The Great Parchment Book consists of 165 separate parchment pages, all of which suffered damage in the fire in 1786. Due to its fragile state, it has not been accessible to readers since this date. The uneven shrinkage and distortion caused by fire has rendered much of the text illegible. ...
In the course of surveying the Irish Society's collection with a view to contributing loans to Derry's upcoming exhibition to mark the 400th anniversary of the building of the City walls in 2013, it was decided to investigate the possibility of conserving the Great Parchment Book. It soon became apparent that traditional conservation alone would not produce sufficient results to make the manuscript accessible or suitable for exhibition.
However, the importance of the item led us to explore other ways of opening up access to the text. A partnership with the Department of Computer Science and the Centre for Digital Humanities at University College London (UCL) established a four year EngD in the Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualisation programme in September 2010 (funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and LMA) with the intention of developing software that will enable the manipulation of digital images of the book rather than the object itself. The aim is to make the distorted text legible, and ideally to reconstitute the manuscript digitally. If successful, such a methodology clearly has much wider potential application. ...
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Events Project updates Digitisation Conservation Virtual restoration History Transcription Palaeography Codicology Tanscription
Dominus Hibernie/Rex Hiberniae: Pre-modern Irish records 1200-1801
12 November 2018
Booking has just opened for Dominus Hibernie/Rex Hiberniae: Pre-modern Irish records 1200-1801, a three day symposium at The National Archives, 21-23 March 2019 The symposium brings...
Continued evidence of interest in Great Parchment Book and the history of the Plantation
9 November 2018
The Great Parchment Book blog has been rather quiet over the last few months, but that’s not to say that interest in the content and the project has declined. To the contrary,...
Celebrating the 5th anniversary of the Great Parchment Book website
4 June 2018
30 May 2018 was the fifth anniversary of the Great Parchment Book website. We were delighted that the website reached 150,000 views around a month before the anniversary,...
Great Parchment Book blog and GDPR
18 May 2018
Data Protection legislation in the UK is changing with the introduction of the GDPR on 25 May 2018 and a new Data Protection Act. The Great Parchment Book blog is available to all via...