Trends & Trajectories In Irish Studies:
Text Mining the
éire-Ireland Archive
Nicholas Wolf, New York University
tinyurl.com/midacis-ei-trends
Corpus Overview
- Published by Irish American Cultural Institute (founded 1962), first issue 1966
- St. Paul, MN, to Morristown, NJ, in 1995
- Special themed issues (c. early 2000s on), with guest editors starting 36 1&2 (~28 guest editors, 2000-17)
Éire-Ireland
Corpus Overview
- Chief editors:
- Eoin McKiernan (1965-1986)
- James J. Blake (1987-1989)
- Thomas Dillon Redshaw (1989?-1995)
- Nancy J. Curtin (1996-2000) and Vera Kreilkamp (1996 - present)
- James S. Donnelly (2001 - present)
Éire-Ireland
Corpus Overview
- 23 years of volumes, 1994-2017 (vols. 29-52)
- Yields 11,011 pages of main essay texts:
- 696 Essays/Poems/Translations
- 7,405 pages with footnotes or works cited
- 1.9 million words
- 454 unique authors
- Online publishers:
- Project Muse, JHU (1994 - present)
- EBSCOhost and Gale Cengage (via print subscription publisher; 1998 - present)
Back Archive
Corpus Prep Workflow
Text Treatment
Corpus Prep Workflow
- Scrape page text from body of plain-text files (due to inferior quality of HTML main text); scrape footnotes from HTML
- Marry footnotes to page text, join essay and issue metadata to pages
Text Treatment
AnALYSIS: QUestions
- What are the features of scholarship in Irish Studies in the past quarter century?
- How distributed is the authorship of contributions to Éire-Ireland?
AnALYSIS: QUestions
- What are the features of scholarship in Irish Studies in the past quarter century?
- How distributed is the authorship of contributions to Éire-Ireland?
- What are the gender breakdowns, and changes in that division over time?
AnALYSIS: QUestions
- What are the features of scholarship in Irish Studies in the past quarter century?
- How distributed is the authorship of contributions to Éire-Ireland?
- What are the gender breakdowns, and changes in that division over time?
- What subjects have been covered, and what trendlines over time?
AnALYSIS: QUestions
- What are the features of scholarship in Irish Studies in the past quarter century?
- How distributed is the authorship of contributions to Éire-Ireland?
- What are the gender breakdowns, and changes in that division over time?
- What subjects have been covered, and what trendlines over time?
- Who is getting cited?
AnALYSIS: Citations
Newspapers & Periodicals
Caveat: 'first-position,' full-citation footnotes, name-like tokens
| Name | Number |
|---|---|
| Irish Times | 100 |
| Irish Independent | 54 |
| Freeman's Journal | 50 |
| The Nation | 43 |
| United Irishman | 32 |
| The Toiler | 32 |
AnALYSIS: Citations
| Name | Number |
|---|---|
| Maria Edgeworth | 30 |
| Sean O'Casey | 27 |
| Ernie O'Malley | 23 |
| Eamon de Valera | 23 |
| John Mitchel | 17 |
| Seamus Heaney | 14 |
| James Joyce |
14 |
Primary Source Names
AnALYSIS: Citations
| Name | Number | Average Fn Location |
|---|---|---|
| Garret FitzGerald | 23 | 70.0 |
| David Fitzpatrick | 13 | 42.9 |
| Seamus Deane | 13 | 21.23 |
| Tom Garvin | 11 | 35.5 |
| Terence Brown | 10 | 32.4 |
| James Kelly | 9 | 50.3 |
Scholars: By Number of Full-Citation, Head-of-Note
AnALYSIS: Citations
| Name | Number | Average Fn Location |
|---|---|---|
| Edward Said | 4 | 5.75 |
| Joel Mokyr | 4 | 6.0 |
| Joanna Bourke | 5 | 6.6 |
| Michel Foucault | 5 | 7.0 |
| Kerby Miller | 4 | 11.5 |
| Kevin Whelan | 6 | 12.1 |
Scholars: By Average Placement of First Footnote
- Total number of unique authors: 454
- Average number of appearances: 1.19
- Gender ratio: 282 males (62%) to 172 females (38%)
- Note: special-issue editors 20:8 male to female (c.f. Amy King et al., VIDA Project, Fiona O'Connor, Éire-Ireland 51:1&2)