I am delighted to bring you another guest blog post from Anne-Karoline, an active member of Wikimedia Community Ireland. In this blog, she shares her experience using Wikimedia projects such as Wiki data in her oral history project that aims to document and record history and heritage in the Kilkenny area, her local region. She delves into her experience and touches on why it is important to document the knowledge gathered beyond her personal website to make it openly accessible to all.
As I wrote about in a previous post, I am currently researching, locating and recording the holy wells of County Kilkenny. For the locating and recording part, I have to talk to a lot of locals. I had also recently taken a course in Oral History with Oral History Made Easy, because the original idea was to conduct an oral history project about milk churn stands/ creamery stands (Q10586871) and to record the part of the creamery history from the farmers’ side.
Over the seven weeks of that online course, it occurred to me that it would be much more efficient to start an oral history project about holy wells and related topics since I was already establishing contacts with all these people who had stories to tell and memories to share.
Apart from many local history publications within limited areas (hence the “local” history) – which have found their way into my Wikidata project – there has not been a county-wide effort to record these since the Schools’ Collection in the 1930s, at least not to my knowledge. A lot of things have changed since the 1930s which have affected people’s attitude towards holy wells and religion and customs of patterns: the Vatican Council in the 1960s, the water scheme, the abuse scandals within the Catholic Church, widespread motorization and maybe more factors that I have not become aware of.
A related topic is patterns which are – as I understand it – community festivals originally taking place at a holy well or similarly sacred place (cemetery patterns/ mass are still quite common), usually on the feast day of the parish’s patron saint or the Sunday after. It was observed previously that the patterns tended to take place at the holy well rather than the church, at least in Co. Kilkenny, but this might have shifted with the need for parking and churches usually having parking facilities.
Pattern of the Dinan 1953 Kilkenny People, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
It’s only early days into the project; I have only interviewed six people so far. I’m using a Roland R-05 for those who are interested, and had to create a Wikidata entry for it, so I could add it to the Structured Data. If anyone has any suggestions on how I could improve on the structured data, please let me know.
Despite having my own website, I decided to upload the files to Wikimedia into the Category:Oral_history_about_holy_wells_in_County_Kilkenny (and the categories for the respective holy well and whatever else the recordings mention), because I’m all for F.A.I.R. data, and my own website might only exist as long as I do.
It also allows me to tag some of the places mentioned in the recordings in the transcription text, even though I might have to create some items along the way. I’m also using the Template:Label {{Label|1=Q-ID|show_id=0}} for place names and some other things in the text to imitate markup language. There are quite a few things relating to Irish folklore which don’t have or don’t have Wikidata entries yet. I haven’t had the time to look into webvtt and xml markup language yet, but I’m hoping that this method will already make for good Linked Open Data.
The first interviews, I uploaded as *.opus files, but if I should use *.ogg instead, please advise me. I’m keeping the original *.wav files on an SD card and my PC as a backup. I don’t think the compression makes a huge difference in the quality, and I was trying to keep the file formats as open as possible.
Only last week I discovered the TimedText tab, so I still have to catch up on adding those. I will still continue to add the transcription on the file page because it allows me to add the labels and other notes.
Listen to Ned Cantwell talk about Trinity Well, St Moynan’s Stone, mass paths and more here. (A.-K. D., CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Transcription Challenges and Using AI
The biggest challenge at the moment, and please reach out, if you have a free and good offline solution, is the transcription which I started doing manually because I don’t trust online AI tools where I don’t know what they’re going to do with the recordings. I’ve found an extension for Google Drive, but I’m a bit uneasy about copyright issues. My interviewees have to sign a recording agreement, but they don’t agree to have their voice fed to generative AI.
A slight problem which can be overcome is that I’m not a Gaelgeoir, so whenever an interviewee mentions a place name that is clearly from the Irish language, I have to ask them to spell it for me and hope that they can spell it. I already had some interesting cases in some of the interviews. It helps that teanglann.ie recognizes spelling similar to Irish spelling as well. And there are a few words already which I haven’t found in the dictionary in that meaning. “Prekeen”, for example, was a word in the last interview describing a small fish that pricks you while swimming in the river. I’m presuming it has something to do with pricín.It is quite amazing how many interesting issues are raised within a 10-15 minute interview, I find.
Since my background is OpenStreetMap, I’m also feeding these hitherto unrecorded place names into that which will generate a richer (Irish) landscape on the map. Canon Carrigan (Q8006590) and Owen O’Kelly (Q126374601) had recorded place names in Co. Kilkenny, but only in text form, not on a map, unfortunately.
Listen to Sean Hoyne speak about St Brigid’s Well and Bóthar Chiaráin in Toberbreedia here. (A.-K. D., CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)
If you are wondering how I got into oral history: I’ve kind of been pursuing it since I started recording field names on OpenStreetMap in about 2019, but I didn’t get audio recordings, so technically, that wasn’t oral history. However, our very supportive Heritage Officer Regina Fitzpatrick suggested I speak at the Oral History Network Ireland (OHNI) conference last year in Waterford (all the good conferences happen in Waterford!) – which I did – and spoke about my place name recording and open data there (on Youtube). This year, a friend of mine attended the spring course of the OralHistoryMadeEasy program and recommended it, so I booked the summer course. Some months ago, I also became a member of OHNI.
And the rest, as they say, is (oral) history.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh to Rebecca and Sophie for their support so far!
#folklore #OralHistory #CountyKilkenny #HolyWells #gaeilge #PlaceNames #logainm #EcumenicalMatter #KnowYourPlace
