Mapping with Uncertainty: Digitising and Preserving the 1826 Education Inquiry

Abstract

The 1826 Second Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry is the most extensive surviving survey of schooling in pre-Famine Ireland, recording teachers, pupil counts, and denomination-specific enrolment as reported by Protestant and Roman Catholic clergy. While foundational in Irish educational history, its relevance to digital preservation practice, particularly the preservation of historical maps built from imprecise spatial observations at scale, remains under-explored. This paper presents the conversion of these analogue records into a durable, interoperable digital collection deposited to the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) as Ireland’s Educational Foundations: Digitising and Mapping the 1826 Education Inquiry (2025). The core contribution is a practical geocoding workflow for historical data where the underlying geography has shifted or vanished. The Inquiry predates standardised boundaries; schools are indexed by townlands, parishes, and informal descriptions that often lack direct modern coordinate matches. We used inference-based matching with modern GIS layers and manual triangulation performed by a research assistant. The paper also reflects on preservation trade-offs between dynamic maps and static, DOI-compatible deposits, using failed capture attempts and resolution constraints as instructive examples.