An Gaodhal Irish (Gaeilge) Monolingual Model

This text recognition model draws on the late nineteenth-century newspaper An Gaodhal, a bilingual (Irish and English) publication produced in Brooklyn by Irish emigrant Micheál Ó Lócháin. Specifically, this monolingual model is derived from pages printed solely or chiefly in the Irish language (known as Gaeilge). It was developed in the course of the project “Building a Digitally Enhanced Edition of the Brooklyn-Published Irish-Language Newspaper An Gaodhal, 1881-1904,” a collaborative initiative between New York University and the University of Galway.

The Irish-language text in this newspaper is almost exclusively set in cló Gaelach, a non-Roman script commonly used at the time. All pages used for the model were corrected by a specialist in the historical forms of the Irish language, and the digital images were provided through the digital library holdings of the James Hardiman Library at the University of Galway. The model preserves key features of the cló Gaelach form: notably, it deploys unicode characters that preserve the punctum used to designate lenition of consonants present in the original text.

The project was conducted with funding support from the Robert D. L. Gardiner Foundation, the Irish Institute of New York, Glucksman Ireland House, and the University of Galway. A full set of OCR outputs from this model and further project information can be found HERE.