Introduction

The Alcalá Project, which created a digital edition of an Alcalá Account Book, was originally proposed as a digital humanities project to mark a humanities collaboration between the University of Alcalá de Henares (UAH), Spain, and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth (NUIM). The source manuscript was encoded and made available in a web based, dual language, searchable and interactive environment. More importantly, a virtual framework was developed to aid the historian in answering historically pertinent research questions that are specifically prompted by the historical object – an account book.

The Royal Irish College of Saint George the Martyr in Alcalá was founded in 1649, with ten students and a small staff that included a rector, two non-resident professors and two or three servants. Its primary function was the education of Irish students for the priesthood. It was closed down in 1785 as part of a rationalisation plan and as a result of the decline in both student numbers and discipline.

The digitised material presented here is taken from the college’s account books. They were placed in the archives of the Irish college at Salamanca on the closure of the Alcalá college in 1785 and were brought to Ireland in 1951. They are now housed in the Russell Library, Maynooth College, and form part of their Salamanca Archive. The accounts, which cover the period 1774 to 1781, offer a unique insight into the day-to-day running of the College with valuable information on diet, discipline and domestic matters. They consist of 324 pages, structured in 63 folios, that is, sheets of paper folded to make several leaves in the codex. They record the ordinary and extraordinary expenditure at the college each month, and also detail information on the number of students and servants provided for.

The Digital Edition

The online digital edition, available at http://archives.forasfeasa.ie, provides a high-resolution facsimile, Spanish transcription and English translation for each of the 324 pages. These are presented in an interactive and dual language environment along with data-sheet functionality to support accounting operations. Supporting documentation is also provided.

A participatory approach, where end-users are actively involved in the design process, was adopted for the development cycle, which led us to prioritise the provision of functionality for social historians researching the Early Modern period. Our end-users are supported by providing for the selection, retrieval and storage of, and subsequent computation on, the expenses contained in the Account Book. In addition to research of interest to the social or religious historian, detailed palaeographic work can be undertaken using the preservation-quality facsimile images in conjunction with ›zoom‹ and ›pan‹ functions.

Information Architecture and Visualisation

A digitised representation of the Alcalá Account Book manuscript has been stored in an extensible online digital repository (FEDORA can host any custom-designed digital object and provide additional services through a process known as dissemination); a client application presents an interactive version of this stored digital object to the user. Both the repository and client were implemented to be flexible; for example the rendering and the interactive user interface dynamically generated by the client were derived from the XML encoding. Furthermore, the Alcalá Account Book and the abstract class of an Account Book were used in conjunction with the XML to dynamically construct an interactive version of the Alcalá Account Book manuscript using the client. The significance of this approach is that future data models of further material from the Salamanca archive can be incorporated into the architecture with minimal program code redevelopment for the client software.