User:Kmccadden/DRAPIer: Digital Research and Projects in Ireland

DRAPIer: Digital Research and Projects in Ireland
DRAPIer is an interactive database of digital humanities projects created by third level institutions on the island of Ireland. Projects of interest can be found by keyword search or by browsing facets such as disciplines, temporal terms, Irish geographic names, Irish institutions, methods and techniques, content types, data formats, metadata formats, research clusters, funding and keyword tags.

DRAPIer documents methods, formats and standards used by projects so that new projects can learn to use similar techniques, or so established projects can find related work. The controlled vocabularies used by DRAPIer are based on those developed for ICT Guides and currently implemented by arts-humanities.net at the Centre for eResearch, King’s College London. The DHO is actively contributing to the ongoing refinement of these vocabularies.

DRAPIer Logo
DRAPIer is named after the Drapier Letters - a series of seven pamphlets written between 1724 and 1725 by the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. Given the historic themes of the collections within in the database, it was clear that the logo shorthand of the visual identity for the database should go beyond aesthetic design. The text used in creating the visualisation is taken from Drapier's Letters. The visualisation was created using a simple text analysis routine written within Processing, an open source programming environment. Each purple circle represents one unique word within the text. The circle's radius is directly proportional to the number of occurrences of the word within the text. Each circle has the same base colour but it is semi-transparent, so that when one is plotted on top of another it appears to be darker, representing overlapping networks and systems in all their guises - from human to digital.

Projects included in DRAPIer meet the following criteria:

 * Affiliated with an institution of Higher Education or Cultural Heritage in Ireland
 * Involves digital arts, humanities, or humanities/science
 * Mandated to produce, or to have produced, substantially extant digital content or deliverables

Projects can be registered at: http://dho.ie/user/register?destination=drapier/