Regional variation in Irish pre-Romanesque architecture

This paper demonstrates that the five Irish early medieval church types have markedly differential distributions. In particular, most of those with antae are in the east, while most of those without antae are in the west. It is shown that this regionalism cannot be interpreted as a deliberate strategy of material differentiation on the part of particular politico-cultural groups. A reconsideration of the chronology suggests that many of the antae-less churches are relatively late, and so the division is primarily indicative of differences in the period and rate of mortared church construction, something that is influenced by both environmental and cultural factors. It is suggested that differences in church dimensions between east and west are indicative of subtle economic differences; and a range of archaeological evidence is used to sketch other economic and cultural variations. These patterns highlight the importance of exploring regionality, even when studying relatively cohesive entities such as early medieval Ireland

Habitual masonry styles and the local organisation of church building in early medieval Ireland

The results of a masonry analysis of the majority of Irish pre-Romanesque churches are presented. A number of local styles are identified in high-density areas, mostly in the west of the country and it is shown that the differences between these styles were not determined by geology. It is argued that these styles represent habitual variation and are therefore indicative of local groups of masons working over a relatively short period of time. This assessment is supported by an analysis of stone supply that suggests that quarrying was organised in an ad hoc manner to supply local needs. These churches are normally placed within a broad timeframe spanning the tenth to early-twelfth centuries but a number of factors combine to suggest that the habitual styles are a relatively late development, perhaps mainly from the mid-eleventh century onwards. Some of the implications of this proposed refinement of the existing chronology are briefly discussed

The Santa Sabina crucifixion panel: ‘between two living creatures you will be known’ on Good Friday, at ‘Hierusalem’ in fifth-century Rome

Essays presented to Professor Emeritus Richard N. Bailey, OBE, in honour of his eightieth birthda

A lightweight approach to research object data packaging

A Research Object (RO) provides a machine-readable mechanism to communicate the diverse set of digital and real-world resources that contribute to an item of research. The aim of an RO is to evolve from traditional academic publication as a static PDF, to rather provide a complete and structured archive of the items (such as people, organisations, funding, equipment, software etc) that contributed to the research outcome, including their identifiers, provenance, relations and annotations. This is of particular importance as all domains of research and science are increasingly relying on computational analysis, yet we are facing a reproducibility crisis because key components are often not sufficiently tracked, archived or reported. Here we propose Research Object Crate (or RO-Crate for short), an emerging lightweight approach to packaging research data with their structured metadata, rephrasing the Research Object model as schema.org annotations to formalize a JSON-LD format that can be used independently of infrastructure, e.g. in GitHub or Zenodo archives. RO-Crate can be extended for domain-specific descriptions, aiming at a wide variety of applications and repositories to encourage FAIR sharing of reproducible datasets and analytical methods.Abstract accepted for talk at Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC2019). Slides https://doi.org/10.7490/f1000research.1117129.1 Poster https://doi.org/10.7490/f1000research.1117130.1 Video recording https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AociW94muL

Linked data authority records for Irish place names

Linked Data technologies are increasingly being implemented to enhance cataloguing workflows in libraries, archives and museums. We review current best practice in library cataloguing, how Linked Data is used to link collections and provide consistency in indexing, and briefly describe the relationship between Linked Data, library data models and descriptive standards. As an example we look at the Logainm.ie dataset, an online database holding the authoritative hierarchical list of Irish and English language place names in Ireland. This paper describes the process of creating the new Linked Logainm dataset, including the transformation of the data from XML to RDF and the generation of links to external geographic datasets like DBpedia and the Faceted Application of Subject Terminology. This dataset was then used to enhance the National Library of Ireland's metadata MARCXML metadata records for its Longfield maps collection. We also describe the potential benefits of Linked Data for libraries, focusing on the use of the Linked Logainm dataset and its future potential for Irish heritage institutions