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

  • Extract embedded text and HTML using Xpdf (open-source PDF suite) pdftotext utility  and pdftohtml utilities.

 

  • Assemble metadata for each issue from filename, and for each essay from file contents (page numbers, page text, footnotes, works cited); hand-correct        ~ 124 author/titles

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%)

 

 

AnALYSIS: AuthorSHIP