Gaelic Algorithmic Research Group

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Hidden Heritages, a brand-new website for accessing Scottish and Irish traditional tales. This resource is the outcome of an international, multi-year collaboration between universities in the UK, Ireland and USA, generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Irish Research Council (IRC). Between 2021 and

Scottish Gaelic, spoken by roughly 60,000 people today, is poised for a technological transformation thanks to the ÈIST project, led by the University of Edinburgh. ÈIST [eːʃtʲ] (‘ayshch’) is short for Ecosystem for Interactive Speech Technologies, and means ‘listen’ in Gaelic. The project is funded by the Scottish Government and Bòrd na Gàidhlig, with key partners

In working on the project for the University of Edinburgh, our team from Code Your Future is thrilled to present our project, ‘Crowdsourcing User Judgements for Gaelic Normalisation’. Aimed at Gaelic speakers, this project will collect user inputs on passages of historical Gaelic writing that have been updated to modern orthography by an AI model

By Catherine Banks As the Decoding Hidden Heritages project is nearing the end of its digitisation and metadata collection stage, this is a good opportunity to share some insights from the project on the importance of archival work for the representation of women’s heritage. While the project’s main focus is on the narrative traditions of

At our recent steering group meeting our Chair, Prof Melissa Terras, noted that the index cards I shared in the post on Alan Bruford’s Tale Types make great writing prompts. This immediately cast me back to my Am-Dram days, when our director would ask us to pick a number and assign us whichever ATU tale

Today (October 3rd) is Scottish Museums Day, a day to celebrate everything great and wonderful about Scottish Museums, galleries and archives! This year, the theme is: A Museum of Happiness, inspired by Stuart A. Paterson’s poem… I’ve made my own Museum of Happiness, which isn’t built of brick or stone or wood, its walls the

Here in the The School of Scottish Studies Archives we have tales classified under the ATU index, as well as tales grouped together under story types, such as Robber Tales, Historical Tradition; Romance Tales; Hero Tales and Legends. There are also indexes of tales which are classified under “Supernatural Witch” and “Supernatural Fairies” which were

The ‘secret’ of making heather ale has been a popular folktale in Scotland, with claims that the brewing of it dates back to ancient times. I came across a few references to it while digitizing the ATU index cards in the SSSA’s Tale Archive. Read the full Gaelic version from Calum Maclean’s collection of Fìion

Our own Prof Will Lamb is working with Dr David Howcroft (lead investigator) and Dr Dimitra Gkatzia from Edinburgh Napier university to build the first tools for Gàidhlig chatbots. This is starting with the creation of a new dataset to train AI models. Our current experiments (which you can participate in if you speak Gàidhlig!) are focused

Today is International Cat Day and that is as good as excuse as any to look in the Tale Archive for any material purrtaining to Felis Catus. Don’t worry though – should you not hold with such cosy nonsense – for the tale I’ve chosen is far removed from cute and fluffy! ‘Sùil a Sporan