A NEW TOOL FOR HISTORICAL
RESEARCH
By Fr Jerry Cremin,
December 1998.
This morning I got an
e-mail message from a man in Indiana, USA,
asking for detailed information about St.
Gobnait. He visited Ballyvourney last year and
it was only when he had returned to the States
that he became curious about our local saint.
His curiosity led him to search the Internet but
all he came up with was a brief biography of St.
Gobnait. I hope to be able to help him,
but the greater wonder is that he has found out
anything at all already. Only five years
ago, if somebody in
Indiana wanted that specialized information it
would have been
impossible to find without combing many
libraries and even then probably finding nothing
on that
side of the Atlantic.
What is the Internet?
The story illustrates the uses and limitations
of the Net. We can
imagine the Internet
as a huge computer with unlimited storage space.
Anybody can connect to that computer with
their phone and copy anything they find there --
text, pictures, sounds -- into their own
personal computer at home. In the same
way, anybody can also add to the store of
information by sending down copies of whatever
knowledge they have themselves and which
they may wish to share with the world.
This is how it has come to pass that there
are more pages of information on the Internet
today than there are human beings on the planet.
There is no way of classifying the information
on the Internet. As
one would expect,
Universities and such institutions are major
contributors of serious research data. But
most websites are compiled by amateurs and
enthusiasts. With so many people running
websites, you can be certain of finding
something about absolutely every subject
imaginable. The drawback is that the
information available is almost always
incomplete.
Nevertheless, the Internet is
fast becoming a universal reference library.
How to use the Internet
Using the Internet is
surprisingly similar to using a library.
You
can use a library to pass a pleasant
afternoon, aimlessly browsing and you can
use a library to inform you on a particular
subject. The same happens on the Net --
sometimes you jump from page to page as the
fancy takes you and sometimes you are ruthlessly
homing in on one set of facts.
As a
researcher, when you take down a
particular book from a library shelf you are
making that choice for one of three reasons: it
is a known TITLE; the library
INDEX has led you to it; a REFERENCE
in another text has pointed you to this
book. In computer language these three
would correspond to ADDRESS,
SEARCH and HYPERLINK respectively.
The Address is the exact location
on the Internet where particular
information
is found. People usually pass around addresses
or read about addresses that they would
find useful. Kilmurry exiles,
for instance, get the address of our
Parish Web Page from relatives at home and then
they regularly look up that address to
catch up with local news and events.
The Search faciltiy allows you
to put in search words and the computer will
give the address of all the pages where those
words occur. The word 'famine' will return
stories of all sorts of famines in all sorts of
places; 'Irish famine' leads you to a more
specialized area. This is the way a
huge percentage of information is found.
A Hyperlink is
something peculiar to the Internet and a most
useful
facility. Any word or phrase in
an Internet page can be made a hyperlink.
What that means is that the phrase can appear on
the computer screen in such a way that when it
is clicked on by a mouse, the reader is taken to
another website with further information about
that subject.
The Future
Using the Internet for historical research in
Ireland is not very productive at the
moment because there is so little local
information available on the Net. I
look forward to the time when every
historical and archaeological society has
its own site. At the moment there are only
about three such sites in the whole of Ireland.
Mallow Archaeological and Historical
Society is one such site. It has a listing
of its Winter Lectures and Summer Outings.
It also has a listing of the Contents of all
the past issues
of its Journal. There are links to 14
other Mallow sites and to 5 pages about
Doneraile together with links to Cork County
Council, map of county Cork, local
accommodation etc., etc.. You can even
hear the tune 'The Rakes of Mallow' being
played.
All this is an illustration of scope
which could be covered by any Historical
Society and a lesson about the need and urgency
which exist for as much documentation as
possible to be made available to the Internet.
There is practically no limit to the amount of
space available, provided one doesn't go
overboard with too many colour photographs.
The cost too is minimal.
Here is a challenge and an opportunity.
Students of all disciplines have always lamented
the difficulty, cost and delay in getting work
published and disseminated. Today any
document, regardless of value or lack of
it, can be made available to the whole world as
fast as it can be typed out.
...
finally, some useful addresses
http://www.burrenarch.com/ Burren Archaeology Research Expedition
http://www.iol.ie/~sec/sites.htm Brief Guide to Archaeological Sites:
http://www.kerna.ie/archaeology/excavations.html Excavations Database:
http://www.ucc.ie/ucc/depts/archaeology Dept of Arch, UCC
http://world.std.com/~ahern/mahs.html Mallow Arch & Hist Soc
http://www.thecore.com/cgi-bin/ire-srch Townland Database
http://vassun.vassar.edu/~sttaylor/ Famine Illustrations;
http://indigo.ie/~lissarda/index.html Killmurry Parish, Co Cork
http://indigo.ie/~adam/adam/index.htm An excellent site by AdamDawson,Doirenalacken,
Ballingeary
http://www.sleeping-giant.ie/inchigeela/ Information on O' Leary Clan Gathering and Daniel Corkery Summer School