Duanaire: a treasury of digital data for Irish economic history. A collaboration with the Library to provide research data management.

The Library has been central in supporting a project called ‘Duanaire’, led by Dr Aidan Kane (Economics). Duanaire aims to open up a wealth of Irish economic history data, and in particular, Irish fiscal history data, by making accessible online a range of datasets in flexible forms for diverse audiences. The project is constructing a unique infrastructure for the imaginative curation, exploration, and sharing of significant tranches of Irish economic history data.

Research data management aspects of Duanaire are a key collaboration between researchers (lead by Dr Aidan Kane) and the Library. The Library provides best practices, technology, technical skills, and services to address data sharing and preservation issues. Duanaire is a pilot project in the Library to offer tools and solutions for the creation, storage, analysis, dissemination, and preservation of your research data.

The Duanaire project borrows for its title the Irish word for song-book or anthology (loosely, a ‘treasury’), to convey the sense of a rich, varied corpus handed down and explored anew.

18th Century Irish Fiscal Data

Duanaire’s first release is a fine-grained dataset of the public finances of Ireland in the 18th century. The core sources are the detailed accounts of revenues and expenditures printed in the Journals of the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland throughout the 1700s. These are remarkably sophisticated accounts, giving unique insights into the evolution of the Irish economy and the press of political and military events in this fascinating period. The fiscal data they contain are captured digitally, categorised in consistent ways, and made available in full online with supporting documentation.

These accounts are presented on www.duanaire.ie in a variety of ways: one can browse the accounts year-by-year, use interactive graphs to explore the data, and download the full dataset, which comprises about 24,000 data items, to enable further research.

Agenda

Duanaire’s immediate agenda relates mainly to fiscal data for Ireland for a variety of periods. Next steps include datasets relating to:

• Public revenues and expenditures of Ireland since Independence
• The public debt of Ireland since Independence
• The finances of the grand juries of Ireland 1775–1898

Duanaire will also provide a platform for a wider community of researchers in Irish economic history to deposit datasets, in a curated environment. Duanaire uses a local Dataverse server to allow datasets themselves to be cited. Duanaire, using Dataverse and in collaboration with the Library, provides data publication, citation and preservation.

NUI Galway Library and Research Data Management

The Library has supported this work in a variety of ways. The core sources range from printed materials, such as government finance accounts held by official publications, to (increasingly) to digital resources—such as the Eighteenth Century Collections Online set of journals of the Irish house of commons. The Duanaire server itself is a virtual machine hosted by ISS, and managed by the Library. Aidan Kane has worked with Cillian Joy (NUI Galway Library) on the set-up of this server, and in particular, the dataverse server which will host the datasets themselves. As with most digital projects, there’s lots to learn, and explore, drawing upon existing expertise in the Library, and learning some new lessons along the way.

Duanaire has also benefited greatly from the support provided by the Whitaker Institute, particularly in respect of branding, and data visualisation.