Knockboy 6 (I-WAT-038) by Simon Dowling
The digital corpus of ogham from Ireland, Britain and the Isle of Man has been created as part of the UK-Ireland Collaborative Digital Humanities Project OG(H)AM, jointly funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council and Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland (https://ogham.glasgow.ac.uk/). It is based on the earlier Ogham in 3D (2013) database, which only partially covered the Republic of Ireland (now archived).
The OG(H)AM project (2021-2025) involved harnessing digital tools from different fields to transform scholarly and popular understanding of ogham—an ancient script unique to Ireland and Britain. It was a collaboration between the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and Maynooth University, Ireland. The project provided the long-awaited opportunity to complete the digital corpus of ogham-inscribed stones in Ireland, begun by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies Ogham in 3D project (2012-15, 2016-17), to extend it beyond stone monuments to cover ogham on all media (including portable objects and manuscripts), and to incorporate the many examples from outside the Republic of Ireland.
One of the main aims of the project was to produce this database, a digital corpus of all ogham inscriptions known to date, from Ireland and Britain, from all periods until c. 1850, and on all support types. It includes images and 3d models (many captured during project fieldwork using photogrammetry and some contributed by others), in addition to many new and revised editions of inscriptions, all encoded following EpiDoc guidelines (v.9.7). EpiDoc is an international, collaborative effort that provides guidelines and tools for encoding scholarly and educational editions using a subset of the Text Encoding Initiative's standard for the representation of texts in digital form. It addresses not only the transcription and editorial treatment of texts themselves, but also the history and materiality of the objects on which the texts appear.
3D viewer
Through collaboration with colleagues at University of Oslo's Museum of Cultural History, we use the updated 3DHop Viewer customised for BitFrost and DynamicCollections (Lund University, Digital Archaeology Laboratory (DARKLab) and the Visual Computing Laboratory at CNR ISTI) to visualise 3D models on our website.
Here is a video demonstrating how to use the 3D Viewer:
ID codes
The OG(H)AM project has given new IDs to each of the inscribed objects (in some cases there may be more than one inscription on an object e.g. I-KER-027: Ballintaggart 6, Co. Kerry). The ID consists of the initial letter of the relevant country/region (I for Ireland, S for Scotland, W for Wales, E for England and M for Isle of Man), followed by a 3-letter county code (e.g., COR for Cork, PER for Perthshire, AGY for Anglesey, DEV for Devon and IOM for Isle of Man) and a 3-digit number for each ogham-inscribed object in that county. We generally follow Macalister's CIIC order, with inscriptions found since 1945 generally ordered according to the date they were discovered. Inscriptions are also listed (and can be filtered) according to Macalister's CIIC numbers.
L-files and X-files:
In cases where ogham inscriptions have been reported in the past but were lost before readings could be established, the ID contains an L before the number (e.g. I-COR-L11 Coolowen, Co. Cork). Where there is a considerable amount of doubt about a reported, possible, ogham inscription, the ID number begins with an X (e.g. I-FER-X01 Ballydoolagh, Co. Fermanagh). Note that these are not displayed on the Inscriptions page unless 'show dubious files' is clicked. Also note that many of these have yet to be added to the online database.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Luca Guariento (Digital Officer on the OG(H)AM project and Senior Research Systems Developer at University of Glasgow) for developing this database. Thanks to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies for hosting the resource and to Jef Bucas (IT Systems Administrator at DIAS) for all his help and ongoing support.
The project team are also grateful to the following institutions and projects, who have made photographs and 3d models of inscribed objects available for use by the project:
Data use and licencing
While the XML files, along with many of the images and 3d models, which make up this digital corpus, are freely accessible and downloadable under a CC-BY-NC-SA License, please note that some images and 3d models are licensed with the institutions in which the objects are held or with those who took the images and require permission for re-use.
How to cite
Formal citation details for the online digital corpus are supplied at the foot of each page:
Katherine Forsyth, Luca Guariento, Deborah Hayden, Megan Kasten, Patricia O' Connor, David Stifter, Nora White, Ogham in 3D, v2.0 (2025), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, https://ogham.celt.dias.ie
To reference individual inscriptions, unique URLs have been generated consisting of the root URL (https://ogham.celt.dias.ie) with the project ID added, e.g., https://ogham.celt.dias.ie/I-COR-001. Downloadable 'Citation Links' will soon be added at the top of each record.
