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How AI and ChatGPT are bringing the voices of forgotten Irishwomen in history to life

Trinity College project will use artificial intelligence to identify and transcribe documents from the 16th and 17th century

Dr Bronagh McShane and Prof Jane Ohlmeyer in the National Archives of Ireland. Photograph: Chris Bellew/Fennell

Ronan McGreevy
Thu Apr 11 2024 - 00:01

History was, until recently, predominantly the stories of men, their deeds and misdeeds written by men for men.

This is particularly true the further you go back in time. Recovering women’s voices from the past, when they had very little autonomy or power in comparison to men, is something that has eluded many scholars.

Voices: Life and Death, War and Peace, c1550-c1700 – Voices of Women in Early Modern Ireland is a €2.5 million, five-year European Research Council Advanced Grant project led by Prof Jane Ohlmeyer in the Trinity College Dublin School of Histories and Humanities.

It started in September and is using artificial intelligence (AI) to recover the voices of Irish women who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries.

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These were the women who witnessed the Plantations, the overthrow of the old Gaelic order, the 1641 rebellion, the coming of Cromwell and the Williamite war.

Wills, court records, surveys, censuses and the 1641 depositions which followed the Catholic rebellion of that year have been word-checked for the voices of women whose records have been erased from the public memory. They reveal the voices of strong-willed women attempting to navigate a world in which the odds were constantly stacked against them.

Eleanol Dardiz, of Jeffrystown, Co Westmeath, complained about her philandering husband Edward Nugent who had “forsaken” her and “estranged himself from herr (sic) and taken another woman to wife”. He had taken the things that she brought with her through her dowry into his new abode.

She appealed to the Chancery Courts as she was legally unable to give evidence against her former husband at Common Law. She asked the chancellor “to restore unto your suppliant all such goods as she brought him”. This, she felt, would relieve her current travails “until God shall work with him”.

A wealthy Co Roscommon widow, Margaret Kavanagh, died without children and directed that her nephew, Moyler Bermingham, when he marries, can only do so with the consent of appointed members of her family and only marry a woman approved by them.

Businesswoman Catherine Strong was the personification of the old adage that “where’s there’s muck, there’s money”. She was Dublin’s town scavenger, whose role was to clean up the human and animal waste from the city centre, a dirty but lucrative job. Documents show she made a fortune and became a creditor on the Dublin circuit at a time when banks were in their infancy.

Eventually the merchants of Dublin complained that she was not a very good scavenger. She was fired, along with her husband, Thomas White, in 1635, but by that stage Strong had her money made.

Prof Ohlmeyer said Irish women are “hiding in plain sight” in many of the documents from this time period. Machine learning and ChatGPT will be used to extract the testimonies of women in the historic documents.

“Women are largely absent from historical narratives, with the historical record privileging the perspectives of elites and elite men in particular,” she said.

In many cases, women are better known in death than in life as wills are a valuable source of information.

“This is especially true in an Irish context when they are dominated by the political, by the military and by men. Their legal status is very compromised. A woman is effectively a chattel of her husband, but that does not mean that they don’t get to exercise agency in marriages,” she said.

Fortunately, women make up a third of the cases taken in the Chancery Courts, the civil courts of that period, which has yielded a large amount of interesting information.

“Often they are business partners and where we see that is during times of war when men are taken off to fight and women are left minding the shop,” Prof Ohlmeyer said. “It is at times of crisis that we see women very clearly.”

Ronan McGreevy

Ronan McGreevy

Ronan McGreevy is a news reporter with The Irish Times

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