Public knowledge of the history of homosexuality in Northern Ireland is mostly of the region's intolerance - from the outspoken Reverend Ian Paisley's 1970s campaign to 'Save Ulster from Sodomy' to more recent lags in legal equality. Academic work has focused on the gay rights movement as it emerged in the late 1960s, reflecting more broadly the dominance of political and 'rights-based' approaches during and since the Troubles (1968-1998). Only a few 'famous queers' - like the Unionist MP for East Belfast Edward de Cobain (charged with 'gross indecency' with teenage boys in the 1890s), or the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement (who cruised Edwardian Belfast and diarised his sexual experiences) - have become known. But there is a longer and untold queer history of Northern Ireland. Men from across class and religious divides found sexual experiences in Belfast and the wider region - from the city's port, parks and streets, to the country houses of the Ulster Protestant elite, and even in small rural communities. Homosexuality was illegal and the subject of a British Isles-wide discourse of disgust, but these men still expressed their desires and - if only to a limited degree - found some acceptance too. If men who had sex with men have not been a major topic of interest in Northern Ireland, writing on women who desired other women is virtually absent. Unexplored collections of extensive private correspondence however, coupled with newspaper debate about gender norms, suggests there were also women who had understandings of same-sex love and companionship. Drawing on under- or never-before used archives, this project will be the first to sensitively and critically reconstruct Northern Ireland's queer past from the late 19th century to the beginnings of the gay liberation movement in the 1960s. We focus on this period because: it saw a notable rise in arrests for male homosexual offences and the emergence of a wayward 'New Woman' discourse, with the creation of archival material as a result; and, like other places, Northern Ireland had an idiosyncratic experience of sexuality before the rise of an international gay rights movement signalled understandings that were shared. Techniques of close-reading will unpick the witness statements used to prosecute men who had sex with men, showing how and where they met and had relationships. Private correspondence, letters and diaries will reveal understandings of identity and desire for both men and women. An intensive trawl of the euphemistic local press, now digitised, will show how homosexuality was publicly represented. Academic articles and a monograph will situate Northern Irish sexuality in the broader literature of 'queer theory' and Irish Studies, while a 1-day colloquium and edited volume will place Northern Ireland's experience alongside the other 3 of the 4 nations of the United Kingdom. Connecting our research findings with the LGBT community, we will inform organisations that educate and support in Northern Ireland. Participatory workshops, supported by the advocacy group Cara Friend, will introduce LGBT youth groups across the region to the history of their own community. A teaching resource will encourage schools to engage with the history of sexuality. An exhibition and programme of public talks and celebrations at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland will demonstrate the importance of queer history to Irish Studies. A commissioned docu-film and interpretive piece of music will bring our project's stories to life. Our website, with a digital map of queer interactions and monthly features, will communicate the project to the public. Combining original academic research with focused public engagement work, this project will reveal a rich and 'hidden history' in the most striking of ways, and enhance both academic and non-academic understandings of sexuality in both Northern Ireland and the wider world.

This project is a new collaboration between Paul Corthorn, the PI, who has an established research record in twentieth-century British Conservatism and Ulster Unionism, and Malcolm Petrie, the CI, an expert in twentieth-century Scottish politics and the development of Scottish Unionism after the Second World War. With the support of a Postdoctoral Research Assistant (PDRA), we will undertake comprehensive archival research in order to examine the evolving relationship between Conservatism and Unionism across the UK in the last three decades of the twentieth century. This was a critical juncture when a previously close relationship, forged amid the politics of the Irish Question in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, unravelled - with far-reaching implications for the survival of the Union today, which are the subject of political science and wider public debate. Aiming to produce a trade book for Oxford University Press so as to reach a wide academic and popular audience, the project team (the PI, CI and PDRA) will grapple with questions about the constitutional form that the Union should take, especially arguments over devolution, and the underpinnings of it, sometimes dubbed Britishness. We will draw on a rich archival base, including a significant number of hitherto un-used sources. Concentrating on political ideas, but placing them firmly in the context of party politics, we will investigate the impact of disputes over membership of the European Community/European Union and the advance of neoliberalism. We are particularly concerned to analyse the often overlooked effect of the end of the Cold War - not least because the relationship between Conservatism and Unionism in the mid-twentieth century was based, to a considerable extent, on a shared anti-socialist perspective. We have a clear strategy in place, with important project partnerships and building on existing relationships, to enable the public impact of our work. This includes: a live BBC radio show on the future of the Union that will become a podcast; newspaper articles; a recorded public talk; a History & Policy event, featuring a 'Witness Seminar' and producing a policy paper on the changing arguments in favour of the Union over the last fifty years; and an on-line resource for GCSE History teachers and pupils on Ulster Unionism in UK perspective. An International Advisory Board, comprising historians and political scientists at all career stages, will oversee the project and participate in two workshops and a conference, held at the sites of key archives in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The board's expertise, and varying perspectives, will therefore feed into discussions at important stages, helping to shape the research and outputs. Under the direction of the PDRA, the board's participation will also lead to a special issue of a major journal such as Contemporary British History that will focus on the 1990s.

Ireland has particular importance in the global history of maps and map-making. Two centuries ago, the island became the first country to be mapped entirely at the large scale of six inches to one mile. While today this might seem unremarkable at the time it was a major achievement. Not only did the map-makers survey and record features on the ground, they recorded an impressive range of local details, including folklore, place-names, antiquities, religion and topography. All of this work was undertaken by the Ordnance Survey (OS) in Ireland during the 1820s-1840s. Very soon, 2024 will be the bicentenary anniversary of the start of this impressive feat, which offers us a timely opportunity to re-evaluate the impacts and legacies of the OS on the island of Ireland. This, then, is the main aim of the OS200 project as a UK-Ireland collaboration in Digital Humanities. This all-Ireland project, "OS200: Digitally Re-mapping Ireland's Ordnance Survey Heritage", will link together historic OS maps and texts to form a single freely-accessible online resource for the first time. Doing so will enable a team of researchers from across Ireland--north and south--to uncover otherwise hidden and forgotten aspects of the life and work of those from Britain and Ireland employed by the OS as they mapped and recorded landscapes and localities. Using new and innovative digital methods, techniques, tools and practices, OS200 will look 'behind the map' to those on the ground who surveyed Ireland's myriad townlands and gathered local stories. The project seeks to understand better this life 'in the field' through the records and accounts left behind by the OS. These legacies of the OS in Ireland are of immense public and academic importance and interest, yet over time what was once a connected corpus of material created by the OS has become fragmented and scattered across different collections. OS200 will reconnect and enrich these materials, recreating connections between memoirs, sketches, letters, name-books and maps, into the whole the OS originally conceived them to be. Timed to coincide with the upcoming bicentenary of the OS in Ireland, our project will offer an opportunity to reappraise the historic impacts of the OS's mapping of Ireland, and their lasting legacies. OS200 connects past and present using 21st-century technologies to analyse and visualise how the OS operated, on the ground, as surveyors encountered 'the surveyed'. This is so important in the context of Ireland, with the complex and sometimes troubled relationships between map-makers and the mapped, between outside authorities-in this case the OS as a state mapping agency-and local communities across the island. With Digital Humanities approaches, these relationships can be examined and explored in new ways to 'open up the map', to help us understand better the processes and practices involved when map-makers went out into the landscape and recorded what was there. For Ireland this work by the OS had great and lasting significance, not least in recording and authorising official place-names, a process captured though not without controversy by Brian Friel's well-known play, 'Translations'. Our UK-Ireland research collaboration between Queen's University Belfast and the University of Limerick, supported by the Royal Irish Academy, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and Digital Repository of Ireland, will re-examine how the OS not only mapped Ireland, but how also in the process they helped to transform it. Our new 'OS200 corpus' and research outcomes relate to the whole of Ireland, its townlands, parishes, fields, farms and loughs. As a result of this timely digital re-appraisal of the OS, not only will OS200 create a deeper and more critical understanding of the mapping and naming of Ireland's people and places, it will provide a tangible and lasting legacy itself, a new digital 're-mapping' of Ireland's OS heritage for all to engage with, study and discover.

The development of the radiocarbon (14C) dating technique represents one of the most significant events in the history of archaeological thought; with this innovative method archaeology really started again in the 1950s. Identifying when things happened in time (as well as where things happened in space) is central to the archaeological endeavour. Since the 1950s millions of pounds/euro have been spent in Ireland and the UK producing 14C measurements in order to undertake archaeological research. These measurements have been funded by government heritage agencies, by academic researchers, by archaeologists in professional practice, by local societies, and by research agencies including the IRC and the AHRC. The numbers of these data have significantly increased in the UK with changes in central planning policy, from Planning Policy Guidance 16 onwards and with the development of professional archaeological practice as part of the construction industry. In the Republic of Ireland, the construction boom associated with the 'Celtic Tiger' economy had a similar impact on the scale of the production of 14C data. The rapid expansion in the numbers of 14C data also underlines how central they are to all forms of archaeology, produced from every type of archaeological site, from the whole 60,000 years of human history when the technique can be used. However, 14C data can only be used effectively in subsequent research if they are correctly reported (Bayliss 2015; Millard 2014); because of a lack of training across the sector essential data attributes are often not reported or made publuc by researchers. If these attributes are lost or removed from radiocarbon measurements their utility becomes compromised and their value lessened. Ironically, given the importance of these data, there has been a global failure to curate them effectively. Across the UK and Ireland, there is no single functioning 14C archive. Because of this, millions of euros/pounds of data are being made rogue - with inaccurate, incomplete, or otherwise compromised 14C attributes often present in research literature. Moreover, the absence of international digital archives for these essential data is a significant barrier to research that seeks to work across national historic environment agency jurisdictions. This has major issues globally for archaeological research, and is especially true for Ireland and the UK, where many research objectives exist across borders, with datasets that do not respect the confines of contemporary nation states. Further, reporting standards mean that many existing 14C data are not interoperable with existing historic environment data management systems. The result is that we are impoverishing vast quantities of data of huge value, and that our research into, analyses of, and curation of the historic environment are similarly compromised. This project will address this significant, international problem for all archaeological research periods by transforming available data from across Ireland and the UK, reconstituting the essential attributes, and safeguarding these data for the future. We will use these data to achieve innovative Big Data analyses into the management of the historic environment, and into archaeological research across all periods and regions of the UK and Ireland. Our lasting legacy will be making these data and our analyses discoverable, open access, sustainable and functional for researchers to come, providing a sector-wide training legacy, and developing schools resources to educate the next generation of digital humanities researchers in the historic environment. We are supported in this work by our historic environment partners in national government, and national heritage agencies, and the digital infrastructure provided by the Archaeology Data Service which will secure this invaluable resource for the future.

More and more government data are created in digital form. Emails have replaced letters, PDFs and Word documents have replaced paper memos, and audio/visual files are stored in governmental internal archives and in various systems. Yet just a small proportion of these data is transferred to The National Archives and other archival repositories for long-term preservation, access and use. The LUSTRE project aims to unlock these data by connecting government professionals with Computer Scientists, Digital Humanists and archivists in cultural heritage organisations. It will focus on the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to digital archival records in order to make them more accessible. Indeed, AI can be used for sensitivity review (i.e., to identify sensitive documents in a mass of data), making it possible to release records that are not confidential. AI can also be used to search vast amounts of data. But it is crucial to avoid biases in the selection and processing of data, which could discriminate against certain groups and even impact the collective memory. This requires policy makers to engage with algorithms rather than treating AI as a "black box." The problem of inaccessible governmental records has become particularly acute following the digital revolution. Rigorous filing systems used to organise paper records. However, these systems are not well adapted to the digital age. In 2017, the report Better Information for Better Government (co-authored by the Cabinet Office and The National Archives) identified issues with the management of born-digital records within government - including poorly organised records, scattered across different systems and almost impossible to search effectively. This lack of organisation leads to difficulties in finding information and giving access to records that users need. The scale of born-digital records also makes it extremely complicated to search for information, particularly when data are scattered on multiple devices and systems. These data could contain confidential and sensitive materials, including materials that could potentially be useful to terrorists and other adversaries. In order to limit risk, data is often locked away and inaccessible to users - including historians, social scientists, journalists and third sector professionals. Archives are meant to be used, not locked away. Inaccessible government records lead to a lack of accountability in the short term, and risk impacting the cultural memory in the long term. How can we improve access to government archival records in digital form? The LUSTRE project aims to unlock these data by delivering the following outputs: _4 lunchtime talks at the Cabinet Office; _a total of 4 face-to-face workshops, including three workshops in London (Cabinet Office and Science Museum) and one workshop in Belfast (hosted by Public Records Office of Northern Ireland); _online survey and 50 semi-structured interviews; _open-access report and journal special issue, including one article co-authored by the PI and postdoc; _cross-sector network on born-digital archives, connecting government professionals with academics and GLAM professionals. A website, associated social media, and a dedicated LUSTRE list-serv will help us connect with interested parties - in government, academia, archival institutions and beyond.