Dr Caitlin Burge, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Galway (STEMMA)
We’re excited to present this second post as part of our special four-part blog series featuring insights from DARIAH-IE’s 2025 Early Career Researcher Bursary awardees.
DARIAH-IE was delighted to be able to support four Early Career Researchers to attend the DARIAH Annual Event, which took place in Göttingen, Germany in June 2025. The event was attended by almost 200 participants from across Europe, with 20 presentations, plus posters, over the course of the 3 days. As well as attending the event and benefiting from the networking and learning it offered, the awardees were given the opportunity to provide a short blog about their own work to share with fellow Irish Digital Humanities researchers on the DARIAH-IE website. These blog posts will be published every fortnight for the next few weeks.
Blog post by Dr Caitlin Burge, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Galway (STEMMA)
In a rare week of gorgeous sunshine, researchers from across the world visited Galway to take part in the STEMMA Hackathon, hosted at the PorterShed, a collaborative workspace for startups and entrepreneurs.
STEMMA (Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475-1700) is an ERC-funded research project developing and applying a data-driven approach in order to provide the first macro-level view of the circulation of early modern English poetry in manuscript. Led by Prof. Erin A. McCarthy in the School of English, Media, and Creative Arts at the University of Galway, with postdoctoral researchers Dr. Caitlin Burge and Dr. Kyle Dase, and PhD student Mille Randall, this project has designed a custom research database of almost 16,000 manuscripts and over 150,000 manuscript items, combining five of the most comprehensive existing datasets on early modern manuscript poetry. Using digital and quantitative analyses, the project aims to address four key research questions:
- How did manuscript poetry escape the control of its authors?
- Who read and copied manuscript poetry?
- How did the manuscript circulation of poetry change over time?
- How can network analysis methods be adapted and applied to account for partial, damaged, or missing archival material?
Watch the ‘What is STEMMA’ video
From 6th to 9th July, the STEMMA team invited scholars to come and work with the current database in a hackathon event: with researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds including manuscript studies, poetry, early modern history, digital humanities, and data scientists provided by our hosting partners, PorterShed, teams made up of a range of specialities were tasked with exploring the data and finding ways to identify patterns or anomalies (or other points of interest!) in the database. With just three days to meet, identify a research question, produce some analysis, and create a presentation for a panel of judges, the goal was not a polished proposal but innovative ideas about exciting ways to work with the extensive material gathered and linked together in the database. During this time, participants were also enjoyed talks given by Prof. Ruth Ahnert from Queen Mary, University of London, Prof. Jing Chen from Hong Kong University, and Marilyn Gaughan Reddan from Galway Culture Company to break up the intense ‘hacking’ and inspire future approaches to research.
The final day saw presentations from all seven teams, for which we were joined by Prof. Rebecca Braun, the dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Celtic Studies. Proposals ranged from developing algorithms to assess the popularity of poetry over time, or the charting of a particular poet’s appearance in manuscripts across a given period, to assessing the stability or variation of poems in the database, or the gender split of poets preserved in manuscript form.
The panel of judges, made up of our principal investigator Erin McCarthy, guest speaker and Galway Culture Company CEO Marilyn Gaughan Reddan, and Kasper Kelter Weinkouff from CVS Health, selected two winners: ‘Most Potential’ and ‘Best Overall’. Team Infinity (John Lavanigno, Julian Neuhauser, Norma Owens, and Akash Ragu,) were winners of ‘Most Potential’, with their ‘Cluster Buster’ app designed to identify the co-appearances of John Donne’s Satyres in manuscripts, demonstrating how information dissemination theories might highlight modes of compilation and shared social practices across manuscript poetry. The winners of ‘Best Overall’, Team InterSTEMMA (Jessica Edmondes, Joshua Eckhardt, William Ikenna-Nwosu, and Heather Wolfe), used network analysis to identify where pairs of poems appeared across multiple manuscripts at once, and spoke about how this might be built further to consider a larger set of poems or manuscripts with varied graph types and possible additions to the existing STEMMA interface.
The event was a great success in demonstrating the usefulness and exciting potential of the project with many teams highlighting their interest in the questions STEMMA are aiming to answer about manuscript circulation – and proposing thoughtful avenues for us to explore ourselves as the project continues. Excitingly, the hackathon also brought together a range of disciplines that often have few opportunities to interact, expanding the understanding of the possibilities of digital humanities for those unfamiliar with it, as well as introducing the problems and data that humanities commonly deal with to data scientists, prompting fresh points of view and modes of collaboration, building our own network of idea exchange that we hope continues long beyond the end of the event.
Biographical note
Dr Caitlin Burge (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the ERC-project ‘STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475-1700’, at the University of Galway, using quantitative and computational approaches to identify instances of ‘rolling archetypes’ and their evolution. Having completed her AHRC-funded PhD at Queen Mary, University of London in 2022, she is currently working on her first monograph using network analysis to consider the career of Thomas Cromwell and epistolary networks at the Tudor court, as well as a digital edition of Privy Council registers from the reign of Henry VIII. Recent articles can be found in Huntington Library Quarterly, Journal of Historical Network Research, and International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing
