Spotlight on Research: OS200 launch and Conference, marking 200 years since the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland

The Ordnance Survey of Ireland (1829 – 1842) was the first large-scale survey of an entire country in the world. Acclaimed for their accuracy, the resulting maps are regarded by cartographers as amongst the finest ever produced in the world. The legacies of the OS in Ireland are especially significant as records which have the capacity to reveal the processes and practices of a state survey that had a profound impact on the government, politics, society, and economy of 19th- and 20th- century Ireland.

The main aim of the all-Ireland ‘OS200: Digitally Re-mapping Ireland’s Ordnance Survey Heritage’ project was to gather historic Ordnance Survey (OS) maps and texts, currently held in disparate archives, to form a single freely accessible online resource for academic and public use. This digital platform, now available at https://dri.ie/os200/ , reconnects the First Edition Six-Inch Maps with the OS Memoirs, Letters and Name Books. In doing so it enables researchers from across Ireland to uncover otherwise hidden and forgotten aspects of the life and work of those employed by the OS and to explore the complex histories associated with the survey and its legacies and impacts still witnessed in the landscape today.

The OS200 project is led jointly by Dr Catherine Porter at the University of Limerick (UL) and Professor Keith Lilley at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), bringing together a cross-disciplinary team of geographers, historians, archivists, linguists, archaeologists, computer scientists, and digital specialists. Drawing on a wide network of archives and research performing organisations, the project also includes as partners the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI), the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), and the National Library of Ireland (NLI).

The OS200 project team in cooperation with RIA and the DRI formally launched the online OS200 project resource on Thursday 20 June 2024, which was held at the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in Dublin. Speakers at the event included John McDonough (Chair of the DRI board), Suzanne McLaughlin (Ordnance Survey Northern Ireland) and Colin Bray (Tailte Éireann). The formal launch was a precursor to the one-day conference held on Friday 21 June also held at RIA.

Drawing on the latest findings of a three-year research project on ‘digitally remapping Ireland’s Ordnance Survey heritage’, the OS200 conference explored how Ireland’s Ordnance Survey unfolded during the first decade of its operations. The conference included presentations by the project researchers, covering a wide range of OS visual and written sources, including maps, letters, name-books and memoirs, using these to reveal new and compelling stories about the OS and its impacts on Ireland’s landscape and culture. To place the Irish OS in a wider context, the conference also included three keynote lectures by leading scholars, Dr Finnian Ó Cionnaith, who presented ‘A peculiar survey for our peculiar purpose: Founding the Ordnance Survey of Ireland’, Dr Katherine McDonough, who presented ‘Doing digital history with Ordnance Survey maps’ and Professor Matthew Edney, who presented ‘The OSI and the world: Systematic surveys of Europe’s Nations and colonies’.

Dr Catherine Porter, UL co-lead of the project said “We are delighted to launch the OS200 online resource where we have drawn together some of the key outputs from the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland. The related conference was an opportunity for the research team to showcase some of what we have been working on, and a book publication is due in 2025. Interest in the project illustrates the importance of bi-lateral funding, project partnerships, and the possibilities the digital humanities can bring to academic and private research.”

Led by the University of Limerick and Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), the OS200 conference and project is co-funded by the Irish Research Council and the UKRI-Arts and Humanities Research Council under the UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Research Grants bilateral digital humanities partnership programme. To learn more you can visit the project website (https://www.irelandmapped.ie/) or go straight to the online resource to explore the collections https://dri.ie/os200/.