Reading the Deeds and Sasines: Irish and Scottish Land Records

Drawing on an exploratory research project funded by the Irish Research Council and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and conducted in collaboration with the Property Registration Authority of Ireland and the National Records of Scotland this paper explores the challenges of using digital humanities approaches to the vast and extraordinarily rich archives of the Irish Registry of Deeds and the Scottish register of Sasines. Together these collections are the richest records pertaining to early modern land transactions in any European society. They reveal much about the place of property in early modern Ireland and Scotland, about urban and rural development, about the prevalence of complex financial instruments, about the connections between seemingly peripheral regions and empire as well as fascinating details about the tens of thousands of men and women, who used deeds and sasines to carry out a wide range of transactions. Their scale (250 million words in the Irish deeds alone in the period 1708-1830) and legal complexity has intimidated and challenged researchers for generations. Our presentation will explain how automatic transcription software (Transkribus) and Natural Language Processing techniques are helping us to understand these records as well as outlining some of the challenges we have and continue to face as we attempt to make sense of these amazing records.

Dr Andrew Mackillop is Senior Lecturer in Scottish History at the University of Glasgow. His new book Human Capital and Empire: Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British Imperialism in Asia, C.1690-C.1820 has just been published by Manchester University Press.

Dr Patrick Walsh is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth-Century Irish History at Trinity College Dublin where he specialises in Irish economic and political history. Along with Dr MacKillop he is Co-Principal Investigator on the Comparing and Combining Early Modern Irish and Scottish Land Records: New Transkribus and Natural Language Processing Approaches project funded by the Irish Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

This is part of the Explore Your Archive 2021 program of events.