In this blog, Dr Liam Mac Amhlaigh, a scholar of contemporary Irish literature and lexicography in Maynooth University, highlights the COMHARTaighde digital collection of Modern Irish Scholarship, deposited on the Digital Repository of Ireland by the Royal Irish Academy Library.
About Seachtain na Gaeilge and #ARAIrelandSnaG120
The Archives and Records Association (ARA) Ireland is running an archive outreach campaign throughout March 2022 in celebration of the 120th anniversary of Seachtain na Gaeilge. Founded in 1902 as part of the Irish Revival by Conradh na Gaeilge, Seachtain na Gaeilge is an annual international festival promoting the Irish language and culture in Ireland and around the world, which reaches over 1 million people on 5 continents annually. Between 1 and 17 March, archives and repositories will be sharing collections that relate to the Irish language using the hashtags #ARAIrelandSnaG120 and #CurdaighDoChartlann (#ExploreYourArchive) in celebration of Seachtain na Gaeilge.
In this blog, Dr Liam Mac Amhlaigh, a scholar of contemporary Irish literature and lexicography at Maynooth University, highlights the COMHARTaighde digital collection of Modern Irish Scholarship, deposited on the Digital Repository of Ireland by the Royal Irish Academy Library.
About COMHARTaighde
COMHARTaighde is an academic journal of Modern Irish Scholarship founded in 2015 that is peer-reviewed by scholars from institutes both in Ireland and abroad. This journal publishes scholarly work of the highest standard, primarily in the following areas of Modern Irish scholarship: literary and cultural criticism, the study of songs and oral tradition, and Irish sociolinguistics. To serve the Irish community worldwide, the journal is published open access on the COMHARTaighde website, where the entire contents of the e-journal are publicly available to users with no charges.
In 2020, the COMHARTaighde journal was deposited on the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) by the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) Library so that this important scholarly research could be preserved for long-term access and enhanced discovery. The journal editors feel that a policy like this adds to the sustainability of the project; if there should be any change to the status of the publisher in the future, digital preservation ensures that the journal’s material will always be available.
Image credit: Dr Máirtín Coilféir, Dr Liam Mac Amhlaigh, and Professor Máirín Nic Eoin, founding editors of COMHARTaighde, pictured together with technical consultant Ronan Doherty, at a launch at the Royal Irish Academy.
This journal is not believed to compete with any other recognised periodical, and it provides a peer-review forum to researchers in fields of study that do not currently have many opportunities for publication available to them. This project builds on the long-standing tradition of the monthly magazine, Comhar, as a place for public thought, and also on the original philosophy of the magazine regarding the dispersion of scholarly findings amongst the widest possible community.
As part of the basic editorial principles of the journal, every effort is made to promote scholarship in the journal’s niche field, Modern Irish literature, authors (both new and established) are encouraged to submit articles to the magazine, a confidential panel of expert peer-reviewers is established and developed, and pioneering work is carried out in the niche field in which the journal operates.
COMHARTaighde makes practical use of modern technology to provide the community with research in Modern Irish scholarship. Every article published in the open-access e-journal can be read online, as a web page, or downloaded in PDF format. References to Irish-language place names are linked to entries in the Placenames Database of Ireland (logainm.ie). References to any figure who appears in the Irish National Biography Database (ainm.ie) is linked to that website as well.
We invite anybody interested in Modern Irish scholarship to explore the rich content in the COMHARTaighde collection on DRI and see what you can discover: https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.8336wq04j
By Dr Liam Mac Amhlaigh in collaboration with Jennifer Gorissen, Publishing Executive, COMHAR
DRI will be participating in the #ARAIrelandSnaG120 campaign from 1 March to 17 March and we look forward to sharing more Irish language collections that we steward. We encourage our followers to search for the hashtags #ARAIrelandSnaG120 and #CurdaighDoChartlann across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to find interesting content relating to the Irish language from archival collections around the world.
