Mission Statement

We aim to bring the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture to the Internet in a rigorously scholarly and user-friendly manner for the widest possible range of readers and researchers.

• Who: CELT (the Corpus of Electronic Texts) caters for academics, scholars, teachers, students, and the general public, all over the world.
• What: the texts are accompanied by introductions, background information, graphics, translations where possible, and scholarly bibliographies.
• How: CELT is integrated into the teaching and research community of UCC and far beyond. It draws on the resources of that community and contributes to its work.

UCC has charitable status, so your donations which help CELT continue its work can be made tax-effectively in Ireland and in the USA (see the Donations page).

Languages

There were many languages used in Ireland in the historic past. The ones known to us through the texts include Irish of all periods, English, Hiberno-Norman French, some Old Norse (including some runic inscriptions) and Latin. Other languages were used by clerics, political leaders, scholars, merchants, diplomats, and emigrants: Spanish, Occitan, Italian, modern French, Provençal, Dutch, and Danish.

Background

The CELT project grew over many years, from the joint involvement of the Department of History and the Computer Centre (now IT Services), and the former CURIA project.

CELT has become a major academic resource nationally and internationally, and is providing skills and expertise applicable in many other fields.

Aims and Objectives

CELT is producing an online database of contemporary and historical topics from many areas, including literature and the other arts. It is showcasing Ireland's heritage, and providing material for the greatest possible range of readers, researchers, academic scholars, teachers, students, and the general public. The texts can be searched, read on-screen, downloaded for later use, or printed out.

Methods

Texts are taken from the best printed editions*, scanned, and proofread. Markup for structural and analytic features is added to the XML master files according to the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Conversions to HTML are made on the fly for online reading, and the master files can be used to create versions in other formats, and for contextual searching, concordancing, and other analyses.

* For copyright reasons not all texts are available. The CELT project does not publish material without copyright permission (or expiry).