About Us

Mission Statement

To bring the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture (in Irish, Latin, Anglo-Norman French, and English) to the Internet in a rigorously scholarly and user-friendly project for the widest possible range of readers and researchers. CELT (the Corpus of Electronic Texts) caters for academic scholars, teachers, students, and the general public, all over the world. Texts are accompanied by introductions, background information, graphics, translations where possible, and scholarly bibliographies. 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, i.e. donations which help CELT continue its work can be made tax-effectively from Ireland and the USA (see Donations webpage).

The languages used in Ireland in the historic past were many. Languages known to us through extant 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, or emigrants (Spanish, Italian, modern French, Provençal, Dutch, Danish).

Background

CELT grew out of the joint involvement of the Department of History and the Computer Centre over many years, including the former CURIA project. Other humanities resources at UCC are Documents of Ireland, the journals Peritia, Chronicon, and History Ireland, and the Cork Multi-Text 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 according to the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Conversions to HTML are made 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).