Navigate the shared linguistic and cultural heritage of Ireland and Scotland. The Decoding Hidden Heritages project brings together over 5,500 folktales from manuscript and printed sources. Using advanced AI text recognition techniques, much of this material has been transcribed and made searchable for the first time. Many of the tales are categorised by Aarne–Thompson (AT) folktale types which means that the material can be explored thematically. This website is the result of the Decoding Hidden Heritages (DHH) project run by the University of Edinburgh and Dublin City University from 2021–24 and funded by UKRI-AHRC and the Irish Research Council under the ‘UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Research Grants Call’ (grant numbers AH/W001934/1 and IRC/W001934/1). As part of this project, a large text corpus of folktales from Scotland and Ireland was created, drawing from the Tale Archive of the School of Scottish Studies Archives and from the Main Manuscript & Schools’ Collections of the Irish National Folklore Collection. This material is currently being analysed and the results will be published in 2026.
