About the Archive

What are the advantages of an online resource such as The Thomas MacGreevy Archive? Perhaps the most obvious advantage is accessibility: it makes available out of print and hard to obtain primary materials located in various libraries and archives on two continents. An online resource like this one is particularly advantageous for a writer like MacGreevy, as many of his writings appeared in little-known Irish publications which are unavailable except for a few institutions in Dublin and London. But this Archive is much more than a virtual bibliography of MacGreevy's writings: it provides, through its search and browse modes, almost instant access to a large body of text which can easily be searched for themes and individuals important to MacGreevy's life and work. And because Thomas MacGreevy wrote about many issues of interest to contemporary scholars of Irish literature, history, and cultural studies, researchers may mine the contents of the archive to delve into some of the most important issues facing Ireland during the first fifty years of statehood.

The Editors of the Archive welcome your feedback. Please contact Susan Schreibman at sschreib@umd.edu with any suggestions or comments.

Using the Thomas MacGreevy Archive

The Thomas MacGreevy Archive contains more than 400 texts ranging from 10kb to 300kb in size. Lucene is used to index the documents. Searching the archive allows for:

If you cannot find the name you are looking for, it might be that the person or organisation is referenced via another spelling. To find the correct spelling, go to Who's Who in the MacGreevy Archive and search there. Once you find the name you are looking for, copy and paste the name in green into the Search page search box, and try your search again.

It is also possible to search the Archive through metainformation terms assigned to each text. This is done through the limit by fields on the Search page. Limit by:

The advanced search and browse pages use a combination of any of the following xpaths to carry out searches:

The document results are sorted by the score as calculated by Lucene. The index generated by Lucene has 13 fields and is 11MB. The total size of the documents is 7.5MB. The codebase for the project draws heavily from teiPublisher

Encoding Information

The Thomas MacGreevy Archive was originally conceived in Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML), and delivered through DynaWeb following The Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI), 'an international and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching, using an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent'.

The TEI provides for very detailed textual encoding to facilitate multi-faceted document retrieval. For example, not only can documents be searched via plain text, but can be retrieved through a rich scheme of metainfomation contained in the headers of each text. For example, through the advanced search page, texts can be accessed according to genre type (articles, books, review articles, etc.). Searching can also be narrowed by subject area or nationality. So for example, one might search for all articles MacGreevy wrote on twentieth century Irish art, or on Dutch literature. For further instructions on searching, please see the Using the Site section.

In 2004 the Archive was migrated to Extensible Markup Language (XML), a W3C standard developed for delivering structured information over the Internet. The majority of collections in the Archive are delivered via Lucene. In 2003-04, the Archive also began developing separate collections which explore varous aspects of MacGreevy's life, work and relationships.

The documentation used by The Thomas MacGreevy Archive is available here, along with our DTDs and an encoding template.

Availability of Texts

Writings by MacGreevy

The Thomas MacGreevy Archive has copyright permission from the MacGreevy estate to publish his writings online. These texts are available for the purpose of academic teaching and research provided that the document header is included in its entirety with any copy distributed. To view the document header, click on the link About this text at the beginning of each document.

Writings about MacGreevy

Permission to make available articles about Thomas MacGreevy or reviews of his books have been obtained for publication in this Archive only. No article may be reproduced without written permission from the writer and/or publisher where the text first appeared.

Acknowledgments

The Editor of The Thomas MacGreevy Archive gratefully acknowledges the many individuals and institutions who have contributed to the creation, hosting, and maintenance of this electronic edition.

Individual Contributors

University of Maryland

Dr. Susan Schreibman, General Editor of The Thomas MacGreevy Archive, is the Assistant Dean for Digital Collections and Research at the University of Maryland at College Park. She was formerly Assistant Director of Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (2001-04), and Professor of Professional and Technical Communication at New Jersey Institute of Technology (2000-01). She was the Semester in Irish Studies Newman Fellow at University College Dublin (1977-2000), where she was also project manager of The Computer Science English Initiative (CoSEI).

She has an MA and Ph.D. from UCD in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, and an MA from University of Pennsylvania in English and Creative Writing. Her Ph.D. thesis, 'The Thomas MacGreevy Chronology: A Documentary Life, 1855-1934', is the basis for the current project. She is the editor of Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy: An Annotated Edition (1991), co-editor of A Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities with Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (2004), and was the scriptwriter for Thomas MacGreevy: Kerry Writer, a documentary aired on Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ) in June 1999.

Amit Kumar is a Programmer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). His areas of research are whiteboard applications and service location protocols, with particular interest in XML based protocols for distributed environments. He received an MS in Computer Science form the University of Kentucky in 2003. He facilitated the SGML to XML conversion of The Thomas MacGreevy Archive, programmed the web application as in J2EE.

Gretchen Gueguen is a Librarian at the University of Maryland Libraries in the Digital Collections and Research (DCR) division. Previously, she was a graduate assistant at both DCR and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). She has contributed to The Thomas MacGreevy Archive, working on the upcoming online exhibit "George Yeats and Thomas MacGreevy: A Friendship in Letters," as well as site design and XML encoding. She received her Master's in Library Science from the University of Maryland in May 2005 and was the recipient of the College of Information Studies Dean's Award for student research and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing's (ALLC) 2005 Conference Bursary Award.

Kevin Lynch graduated in May 2002 with a Master's degree in the Library Science in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. He currently works as a librarian for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Elizabeth Tobey, Project Manager of The Thomas MacGreevy Archive (2001-04) is a doctoral student in the Department of Art History at the University of Maryland. She specializes in Italian Renaissance art, and is researching the dissertation, The Palio in Renaissance Art, Thought, and Culture. She recently re-designed The Thomas MacGreevy Archive site and is working on an online "exhibition" about MacGreevy's friendship with the Irish painter, Jack B. Yeats.

eriC White is a graphic designer and webmaster at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). He received his B.A. in art history from the University of Maryland in 2002. He designed the collection Thomas MacGreevy & Jack B. Yeats: An Online Broadsheet, and made many improvements to the website for the 2004 site.

MITH Research Assistants include Christopher Baran, Stephanie Edwards, Ruben Gomez, Katrina Martinez, Amani Robinson, and Yi Weng.

New Jersey Institute of Technology Research Assistants

Jose B. Chua and Carlos Guarda.

University College Dublin Participants

John Dunnion has BSc and MSc degrees in Computer Science from University College Dublin. He has worked in the Department of Computer Science in the University of Manchester, England, and has studied in the Technische Universitat in Munich. He worked on Project Minstrel, one of the first EC ESPRIT projects in Ireland, and on SIMPR. He has been awarded grants by Eolas and Forbairt and has been awarded grants by the German Academic Exchange Service and Comett. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and is Project Manager of the INTENTS project, funded by Forbairt's Advanced Software PAT.

Liadh Kelly completed a BSc in Computer Science from University College Dublin in 1998. She recently completed a MSc, also in Computer Science, from University College Dublin under the INTENTS project.

Paula Murphy completed her BA in English and Philosophy in 1995 from University College Dublin and is currently completing an MA in Modern English Literature. She is currently a Humanities Research Assistant for the MacGreevy Hypertext Chronology.

Judith Wusteman has been in the Department of Library and Information Studies at UCD since September 1997. Before that, she was a lecturer in the Computing Laboratory, University of Kent at Canterbury for seven years. Judith has a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence. Her current research interests are in electronic publishing, particularly relating to humanities computing, e-journals, document structure and formats, SGML, and XML. She has been involved in various projects and consultancies in the field of electronic publishing.

UCD Research Assistants include Paul Candon, Gillian Farren, Aidan Halpin, and John McDermot.

Archive Consultants

J. James R. Knowlson, BA, Dip Ed, PhD (Reading), Emeritus Professor of French and Director, The Beckett International Foundation, The University of Reading.

J. C. C. Mays, MA (Oxon), D.Phil. (Oxon) Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin.

Daniel Pitti, BA, MA, C.Phil., MLIS, (University of California, Berkeley), Project Director at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia.

Ann Saddlemyer, BA (Saskatchewan), MA (Queen's), PhD (London), Professor Emeritus of Drama, English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, Adjunct Professor of English, University of Victoria.

John Unsworth, MA (Boston), PhD (Virginia), former Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at University of Virginia; currently Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with appointments as Professor in GSLIS, in the department of English, and on the Library faculty.

Other Acknowledgments

The Thomas MacGreevy Archive gratefully thanks the following organisations:

The Capuchin Fathers, for allowing us to reproduce MacGreevy's articles in The Capuchin Annual and The Father Mathew Record.

David Clarke, for granting us permission to reproduce Margaret Clarke's 'Pierrot and Columbine', in which MacGreevy served as the model for Pierrot.

Enterprise Ireland for having the vision to generously support an inter-disciplinary research project.

FÀS, for providing The Archive with many research assistants, each of whom contributed enormously.

Margaret Farrington and the late Elizabeth Ryan, MacGreevy's nieces, for their unwavering support of the project, and for their generosity in allowing us to include in the Archive MacGreevy family photographs and documents.

The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia and particularly Daniel Pitti, for invaluable advice in implementing the TEI Guidelines, and for publishing the archive.

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities for its generous support in human and technical resources.

The National Gallery of Ireland for allowing us to reproduce images illustrating Pictures in the National Gallery of Ireland.

The Newman Scholarship Fund, for providing Susan Schreibman with a generous post-doctoral fellowship to begin this project.

New Jersey Institute of Technology who have generously supported this project through Specially Budgeted Research Grants.

Trinity College, Dublin for providing us with access to Thomas MacGreevy's manuscripts, and for allowing us to make them available over the Internet document manuscript numbers.

John Turpin, for providing us with his own photographs of John Hogan's statues to illustrate 'Some Statues by John Hogan.'

University College Dublin for their support of this project financially and materially.

The late Anne Yeats for allowing us to reproduce paintings by Jack B. Yeats which illustrate 'Three Historical Paintings by Jack B.Yeats', which was published in The Capuchin Annual 1942.

Michael Yeats for allowing us to reprint Jack Yeats's letters to Thomas MacGreevy.