Wired To The Irish World

Perhaps because emigration scattered so many from Ireland across the globe, or because the culture has more than two millennia of history, the Web has a robust cache of Irish links.

All sorts of sites document both the formal and folk arts, many relying upon old craft designs whose simple geometric or organic designs tend to translate well onto Web pages.

Here is what can only be a partial sampling:

The Story of Mac Dathó's Pig, is a site dedicated to an Irish saga.

Its home page reproduces an old illustration and the tale, in English and Irish, describing a feast and heroic competition. A manuscript from the 12th century narrated this tale that seems to occur in the early Christian era.

The story "belongs to the heroic cycle of Ulster, depicting some of the events which lead up to the Táin Bó Cúalnge, the Cattle Raid of Cooley," according to the site. "Many, in fact, consider it to be a parody of earlier heroic tales."

The site's creator, Vassar College's Steve Taylor, describes himself not as a scholar but "just a technologist descended from famine emigrants," who wanted to show how early texts could be reborn on the Web.

A more modern literature link is Work in Progress, a Web site dedicated to James Joyce. Professor Rob Callahan of Temple University offers in his introduction titled "Mind your hats goan in:"

"Our present technology encourages us to rethink the notion of 'text' in radical ways," the intro invites. "Intricately self-reflexive and densely allusive," it continues, "containing multiple links to both internal and external documents - Joyce's work anticipates so-called hypertext. Likewise, the encyclopedic urges of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake resemble the Internet's impetus towards boundless inclusion."

"The metaphor of a spider's web has often and appropriately been used to describe Joce's writings, and fittingly the same metaphor has been used to describe the interconnected tangle of text on the 'Net," it concludes.

If you want a Web portal whose geocenter is squarely in Ireland, check out Doras. This directory indexing Irish-related sites boasts a search engine and clear navigation, cleanly divided into 18 different categories, including family, music, film, genealogy and business and computers. Doras turns out to be the Irish word for door. The site awards shamrocks for links it admires.

Celtic Art & Cultures offers images, maps, timelines and designs. This site, originally created for an art history course at the University of North Carolina, allows fans of ancient Celtic art forms to understand and better examine them.

With its interactive encyclopedia of objects and images, users can choose a time period, then pick an art form (sculpture, for example) and a material (bronze, say), and it coughs up examples. Its timeline explains, among other things, that Celtic culture appeared in 800 B.C. and at one point routed its way through Spain.

While the practice of clustering a constellation of sites in a ring is not confined to Irish sites, the use of so-called WebRing navigation, created by a division of Yahoo, certainly seems appropriate. In this way, those building sites with common themes can link them together; the network is accessible by clicking in sequential order, like touching beads in a garland, or by visiting a complete index page.

The Celtic Culture Webring includes an image of a ring of stones, perhaps an ancient cairn, on the home page. Many of its links deal with spiritual and even pagan origins of Celtic culture.

The Ring of the Red Dragon covers a broader swath of turf. Sites cover matters of Wales and Welsh people along with Celtic culture and history.
By Marjorie Backman;