Gaelic Algorithmic Research Group

  • Opening the Well in 2025
    by lmellon on DiM, 23 Dùbh 2025 at 8:46m

    We are nearing a month of the Opening the Well website being live, and the number of transcribers on the platform keeps increasing which is so excellent to see – thank you to everyone who is taking part and has told others about it. There are also many folk interested in gaining transcriptions of Gaelic

  • Copyright and Permissions for Opening the Well
    by lmellon on DiL, 15 Dùbh 2025 at 4:39f

    Launch With ÈIST launching Opening the Well / Fosgladh an Tobair on the 2nd of December, we felt it was important to “introduce” you to the ‘Copyright and Permissions Administrator’ on the project. So, everyone say hello to Seumas. They are pictured here in attendance of the Opening the Well launch. This was at the

  • Launching a Treasure Trove of Gaelic Folktales: Welcome to Hidden Heritages!
    by wlamb on DiL, 9 Ògmh 2025 at 10:51m

    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

  • Gaelic in the Digital Age: Inside the ÈIST Project
    by wlamb on DiC, 4 Ògmh 2025 at 4:57f

    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

  • Developing a Web App for Crowdsourcing Judgements on Gaelic Text Normalisation
    by wlamb on DiC, 13 Dùbh 2023 at 10:17m

    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

  • Decoding Hidden Women: Feminist digitisation practices in the Tale Archive
    by wlamb on DiL, 23 Dàmh 2023 at 8:11m

    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

  • Writing Prompts
    by lscollay on DiC, 7 Dùbh 2022 at 2:46f

    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

  • Stories of Happiness
    by Cristina Horvath on DiL, 3 Dàmh 2022 at 3:09f

    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

  • Bruford’s Tale Types
    by lscollay on DiC, 21 Sult 2022 at 10:50m

    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 Heather Ale (Fìon an Fhraoich)
    by Cristina Horvath on DiC, 24 Lùna 2022 at 8:17m

    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