CELT, the Corpus of Electronic Texts, in UCC's History Department, is an internet-based corpus of the primary sources of History and Irish Studies in Irish, English, Latin, and French with over 14.75 million words of text in 1165 documents. CELT is freely available and growing. For over fourteen years, CELT has been a pioneering and highly successful Humanities Computing project. It blends technology with humanities scholarship and easy access. This resource for students and researchers in Irish Studies and History is widely used in universities in Ireland and abroad.
CELT has been growing further through Writers of Ireland. This project is providing electronic editions of some of the most important Anglo-Irish literature in English of the 17th to early 20th centuries, bringing to the Internet Ireland's finest writers, scholars, and publicists, as well as the view of English writers on Ireland.
By April 2012, Writers of Ireland has published a substantial collection comprising a wide range of themes and topics. It covers works by writers as diverse as Sir Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, George Berkeley, John Stevens, Jonathan Swift, John Milton, Arthur Young, Osborne Davis, James Clarence Mangan, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Sir Robert Kane, Richard Pococke, William parnell, Thomas Crofton Croker, William Allingham, John O'Donovan, Theobald Wolfe Tone, Eoin MacNeill, James Connolly, John M. Synge and W.B. Yeats. Volunteers and private sponsors have supported this project. Depending on funding, CELT may be able to make publish more writings by the most important Anglo-Irish voices: Laurence Sterne, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, William Drennan, Henry Grattan, Daniel O'Connell, Michael and John Banim, William Carleton, and Eugene O'Curry are on our list.
Significant synergies have emerged with CELT's sister project in the History Department, Multitext which meets the needs of students and aficionados of Irish history. The HTML search engine on the Homepages of CELT and Multitext allows convenient search for content of both projects.
Since November 2005, when Writers of Ireland was partly funded by the President's Strategic Fund, University College Cork, we have managed to gain complementary funding from a private source in June 2006. In 2007, UCC's School of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences generously agreed to provide funding.
While at present there is no funding earmarked for this subproject of CELT, we continue adding texts from time to time. This has been facilitated by the invaluable work of graduate interns who joined us from Austria and Germany.
