The Special Collections and Archives Department at the Glucksman Library, University of Limerick has been awarded £107,365 in funding from the Wellcome Trust to catalogue, conserve, digitise and increase accessibility to the Shannon Development Photographic Archive.
An outline of the project is available here, or you can view the New Jerusalems project website here.
Once the images from the Shannon Development Photographic Archive are digitised and catalogued, they will be made available for researchers and members of the public. These images inspire a range of new research questions, regarding life in Ireland in the 20th century, the planning and architecture of a ‘new town’, as well as the lives of the workers who lived and worked in Shannon and its surrounds. Moreover, digital humanities research methods allow us to analyse the images and their associated metadata in new ways. This page displays a some sample data visualisations using the Shannon images.
Timeline: developing a new town in Shannon
Mapping the Shannon images
Explore Shannon town
Shannon then and now
Shannon town population
Data from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon,_County_Clare) and CSO SAPmap (https://visual.cso.ie/?body=entity/ima/cop/2016&boundary=C03899V04650&guid=EC68A874-230F-4765-80DC-3BD08D892740)
Further information
For more information on the project, as well as the other UK archives services and town collections included, you can sign up to the newsletter and view the New Jerusalems project website here.
Click here to read the full project press release.
Follow the progress of the project on Twitter @UL_SpecColl and on the Special Collections and Archives Department blog specialcollections.ul.ie.