Mapping the Civilian Fatalities of the 1916 Rising

The Forgotten Majority

Source:1916 Necrology: 485, Glasnevin Trust

Glasnevin Internship brief:

• “Exploring the possible development of a project mapping the addresses of those killed during the 1916 Rising buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. A large proportion of those killed during the rebellion are buried in Glasnevin and it would be a valuable addition to our 1916 Rising centenary projects to create a digital map with markers showing the addresses of those killed, which would be made available online.”

Methodology:• Microsoft Excel Database:

• Merge data from a variety of sources:• Burial Records – Poor Register, Purchased Graves• Irish Military Archives Online• 1911 Census Records Online• The Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook 1917 (The Irish Times)

• Corroborate textual sources with cartographical tools to pinpoint coordinates:• Ordinance Survey of Ireland (OSI)• Thom’s Directory 1917• Google Maps

Ordinance Survey of Ireland (OSI):

Online Public Viewer

Source: www.osi.ie

OSI Historical GIS Map Series•Georeferenced Historic Layers; Overlay slider•High degree of accuracy•Historic 25” B&W (1897-1913)

Google Fusion Tables: Heat map – represent imprecision and/or ‘chaos’

Google Earth: Historic Overlay

Map the past onto the presentAdds interpretive layer and visual historical perspective

How to represent the data visually

Information Design:•Visual Clarity•Interactive and immersive•User friendly

Why Maps?: Translating History in a Digital Society

a) Content to which the people can relate more meaningfully is more likely to be engaged with.

a) People more easily remember affective experiences.

b) People enjoy and remember more from experiences that are interactive and immersive.

Maria Economou: “…a mass of data is not sufficient for the creation of knowledge. In order to become meaningful, it needs to be contextualized, selected, interpreted...”

[Maria Economou, ‘A World of Interactive Exhibits’, Museum Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums, (eds) Paul F. Kennedy and Katherine Burton Jones, (Routledge, 2008), p.152]

Public History and curating ‘difficult knowledge’

• David Fitzpatrick: “…historians should try to add moral intensity to the ways in which we commemorate and comprehend our past.” [David Fitzpatrick, ‘Historians and the Commemoration of Irish Conflicts’, Towards Commemoration: Ireland in War and Revolution 1912-23, ed. John Horne, Edward Madigan, (RIA, 2013), p.127]

• Historians should complicate the picture – alternative, awkward narratives

• Facilitate independent judgement of a violent past• Making history and memory is a shared experience • Public Historians should seek innovative ways of sharing

history