CELT and its Projects

CELT is a searchable online corpus of multilingual texts of Irish literature and history with over 19 million words available, and growing. We have over 10 million requests for pages per year, and over 1600 available texts.

From 2003 to 2006 the Irish Higher Education Authority (HEA) funded the research project Linking Dictionaries and Texts (LDT) in which CELT collaborated with the University of Ulster at Coleraine. At Coleraine the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of the Irish Language (DIL) was transformed into electronic format. The result is called eDIL and is available here. It covers the period 700–1700. Our collaboration in LDT involved creating computer-readable links from the Dictionary's citations into CELT's online texts, and adding a large number of Old and Middle Irish texts in electronic editions, supplemented by English translations where available. This work has been finished.

From 2006 to 2011, CELT has also been encoding and editing materials written by Ireland's finest Anglo-Irish writers mostly from the 17th to 19th centuries. We would especially like to thank our funders and our dedicated group of friends and volunteers, who have helped us greatly in this effort, and are continuing to do so. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the UCC School of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences which has made this research and service possible.

In 2011 CELT published 42 texts (with a total of 700,000 words) in Irish, English and Latin to the Internet. Among CELT's English documents some have never been published in print before.

In 2012 CELT published 148 texts with over 635,000 words. Over the years, interns from the Tyrol, Germany, France and of course from Ireland have helped to prepare more material.

In 2013 CELT published 38 multilingual texts (in Middle and Early Modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Latin, English and German) with 691,860 words.

In 2014 CELT published 132 multilingual texts (in Old, Middle, Classical and Early Modern Irish, English, French and German) with 570,500 words. In addition, the Galloglass Database was made available in 2014 at http://galloglass.ucc.ie/ .

In 2015, 60 multilingual files (in Middle, Classical, Early Modern and Late Modern Irish, English, French, Italian and German) with 786,600 words, or 3146 standard pages, were published. This brought the total to 17 million words in 1525 scholarly TEI-XML-encoded texts.

In 2016, 78 multilingual files with 677,300 words, were published based on TEI-XML, and one file, The Crazy Circle, was published as PDF. This brings the total to 1604 texts online.

In 2017, 16 multilingual files (in Middle, Classical, Early Modern Irish, and English) with over 295,200 words were published. This includes texts contributed by Dr Ruth Canning relating to The World of William Penn project.

Beatrix Färber compiled a webpage about the Life and Work of pioneering Irish scholar Winifred Wulff. Content and phtotos were kindly provided by Professor Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha, who researched this subject in depth. The beautiful photos are available exclusively on CELT. Winifred Wulff's edition of the medical treatise Rosa Anglica, online at CELT, was the focus of the seventeenth annual ITS seminar held by UCC?s Irish Department in 2015; with the proceedings published in 2016.