LU senior helping Ireland re-discover its history
Senior history major Megan Goeser is serving a rewarding virtual internship with Beyond 2022, an all-Ireland and international collaboration to launch a Virtual Record Treasury for Irish history.
June 30, 2022, marks the centenary of the explosion and fire at the Four Courts, Dublin, which destroyed the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI) and, with it, seven centuries of Ireland’s collective memories. While incomparable with the loss of human life, the destruction of the Record Treasury at the PROI was one of the great tragedies of the Civil War.
Beyond 2022 is an open-access, virtual reconstruction of the Record Treasury destroyed in 1922 that combines historical research, archival discovery and technical innovation.
Megan recently posted a blog item on the Beyond 2022 website, where she shared, “All in all, this internship has surpassed the expectations that I had for it at the beginning. I was very nervous to come into a project that was already in full swing, never mind a project that was being managed thousands of miles away! We managed to work through the six-hour time difference and my crazy schedule to be able to make this internship work.”
Her primary task is reading biographies of all of the chief governors of Ireland between the 12th-20th centuries and inputting pertinent information from their biographies into a spreadsheet, which will then be used to help form the Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph is a resource being developed by the project’s computer scientists and historians which will allow researchers to explore the records of Irish history processed by Beyond 2022.
This is Megan’s fourth major work experience that she’s served through Lakeland’s Cooperative Education program. Previous experiences were with the Luxembourg American Cultural Center, the Sheboygan County Historical Research Center and the Fond du Lac County Historical Society.
