About

The Hilda Tweedy Archive is a digital archive and exhibition on the life, work and accomplishments of the Irish women’s (and human) rights campaigner Hilda Tweedy (1911-2005). By showcasing primarily personal documents and other records of Hilda and her family this digital archive is a recreation of Hilda Tweedy’s life, including the experiences that motivated her to become engaged in the struggle for social justice and equality.

The archive was developed and created as part of the Bridge-IT project, a digital humanities project undertaken by the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin, which aims to preserve and increase the accessibility of sources for academic and private research while displaying the material in a technologically innovative and user-friendly way.

Most of the material used for the website has been collected and researched by Dr Jean Tweedy Walker who also funded the project in honour of her parents.

The project was managed and coordinated by Claire Marie Quentin, Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies. Her role involved the production of the archive, the metadata management according to Dublin Core standards and part of the data input via Omeka. She also conducted research and accumulated and digitized some of the sources.

The material is accessible in two different formats: through an interactive Timeline of Hilda’s life which displays a selection of the documents in a biographical context and in the Archive. The Archive comprises all of the records and they can be searched under various categories and can also be viewed in specifically themed collections. The records contain a wide variety of private and public records, including personal writings and documents by Hilda Tweedy, an extensive range of photographs, interviews and newspaper articles as well as a digital version of Hilda’s book A Link in the Chain: The Story of the Irish Housewives Association 1942-1992.

The website also provides links for further research, such as to the Tweedy Papers which are held by the National Archives of Ireland and contain the records of the Irish Housewives Association.

The copyright of the original images and documents of the Hilda Tweedy Archive belong to the Board of the Library of TCD and are not available to be downloaded. They can viewed online at this website.

To add to the collection please contact the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin at cgws@tcd.ie.

Hilda Tweedy Archive Project Team:

Dr Catherine Lawless, Director of the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin
Dr Maryann Valiulis, Principle Investigator, Hilda Tweedy Archive
Claire Marie Quentin, Project and Metadata Manager, Hilda Tweedy Archive
Ben Dromey, Website Design and Development, Hilda Tweedy Archive

Special Thanks to:

The Tweedy Family (Children of Hilda and Robert): Robert Ferguson Tweedy, Elizabeth Carlyon MacGovern, Jean Tweedy Walker

Thanks also to:

Dr Jennifer Redmond, Dr Deirdre O'Donnell, Prof. Linda Doyle and Niamh Brennan for their work on the previous two Bridge-IT projects (Lifescapes: Mapping Dublin Lives; Life History Archive) from which the methodology of the Hilda Tweedy Archive evolved.

Dr Deirdre O’Donnell for planning and preparing the initial project proposal.

Michael Troughton-Smith, nephew of Hilda Tweedy, for providing additional archival material and remembrances of Hilda.

Georgine Grey, Lars Westerberg, Margaret Tweedy and Mary Ryan for their remembrances of Hilda Tweedy.

Acknowledgements:

The Irish Newspaper Archives and The Irish Press; The Irish Newspaper Archives and The Irish Independent; The Irish Times; RTE Archives.

The creators of Omeka at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

VéritéCo and the Knight News Innovation Lab - the creators of the Javascript library TimelineJS.