So I want you to picture a highly specific scenario
for a second. OK. Imagine holding a direct, like
a physical connection to the year 1738 in your
hands. Oh, wow, 1738. Right. So we are talking
about the era of powdered wigs. The Enlightenment
is in full swing. And news is only traveling
as fast as a horse could gallop, basically. or
a ship could sail. Yeah, pre -industrial. Exactly.
And usually when we think about interacting with
a primary source from that far back, the image
that comes to mind is, well, it's quite intimidating.
It is. You picture the white gloves. Yes. You
picture yourself in this, like, heavily air -conditioned,
subterranean vault of some elite university.
You're wearing the white cotton gloves, you're
speaking in hushed tones, and you're basically
terrified to breathe too heavily on the parchment
just in case it crumbles into dust right in front
of the archivist. Which is a very real fear with
paper that old. It really is. Yeah. But what
if, instead of that highly restricted environment,
you were just sitting in your living room? You're
drinking your morning coffee, and you are simply
clicking a mouse to scroll through the exact
same historical document. It completely flips
the traditional script of historical research,
doesn't it? It really does. Because that image,
that shift from the vault to the living room...
captures the fundamental shift we're looking
at today. You aren't just looking at old paper
on a screen. You are looking at the democratization
of information. I like that phrase, democratization
of information. Because historically, the documented
primary source past was strictly guarded. It
was entirely the domain of gatekeepers. Right.
If you wanted to read an 18th century broadsheet,
you needed the academic credentials to get into
the library in the first place. Oh, you had to
know somebody. Exactly. or you needed the financial
resources and just the sheer free time to travel
across the globe to wherever that physical piece
of paper was housed. Yeah, which most people
just don't have. No, they don't. So what we are
exploring is how that geographical and institutional
barrier has been entirely dismantled. And that
is exactly our mission for today's Deep Dive.
We are unpacking the Irish newspaper archives.
Often referred to as the INA. Right, the INA.
We're looking at some really rich materials we
found, unlocking 250 years of history with this
digital collection of Irish newspapers. It's
a massive collection. It is. It's recognized
as the world's oldest and largest digital archive
of its kind. And we want to figure out how this
massive online database actually came to be.
How it fundamentally transforms the way we access
Ireland's history, the culture, and even just
the highly granular details of daily life spanning
over two and a half centuries, right up to the
present day. It's an incredible timeline. Okay,
let's unpack this because before we get into
the tech behind it, we need to talk about the
sheer footprint of this collection. The scale
is what makes it such a formidable tool. When
I was looking at our sources, the logistics alone
made me pause. I don't blame you. Based on the
core information, the INA is a commercial online
database of digitized newspapers. But the defining
metric here is the timeline. Right, the 1738
start date. Exactly. It spans from the year 1738
continuously up to the modern era through 2025.
That's, I mean, that's just wild. You are talking
about a continuous, unbroken textual record of
more than two and a half centuries. An unbroken
record. Yes. And to your earlier point about
the footprint, it isn't just a digitized version
of one or two national papers of record. Like
it's not just the big Dublin papers. No, not
at all. The archive encompasses roughly 260 different
newspaper outlets. 260. Yes. Printed all across
Ireland, but importantly, it also includes publications
printed abroad by Irish diaspora. 260 different
titles. That is an almost unfathomable amount
of ink and paper. And human effort. Yeah, human
effort. When you step back and think about the
eras covered there, you've got small rural towns,
major industrializing cities. You've got the
shifting of political borders, the famines, rebellions.
The founding of the republic. Exactly. All the
way into the modern tech boom in Dublin. It's
a massive historical dragnet. But I have to ask,
what does having 250 distinct publications actually
give us? What do you mean? Well, what does that
give us that a few major national papers wouldn't?
Ah. What's fascinating here is the difference
between macro history and micro history. Okay,
macro versus micro. Right. The macro history
is what you get in a textbook. or even in a major
national daily paper. The big headlines. Exactly.
The national paper tells you that a treaty was
signed in London or a new tax was levied in Dublin.
It gives you the broad strokes of geopolitical
shift. The stuff you have to memorize for a test.
Exactly. But 260 regional and local papers give
you the microhistory. The ground level. It shows
you the immediate downstream effects of those
macro events on the ordinary citizen. Oh, that
makes sense. You get the daily commerce, the
shifting price. at the local cattle market, the
birth and death notices. The local political
disputes. Yes, and even the local gossip. It
is the granular texture of how people actually
lived, what they feared, and what they valued
on a random Tuesday in 1845 or 1916. It's the
texture that I find so compelling. It's the arguments,
the cultural quirks, the things that never make
it into the history books, but completely define
an era. Absolutely. In fact, I found this brilliant
example hidden in our source material. It's an
article by Dara Kosyada. Of the linguistic debate?
Yes. The INA was actually used by a journalist
to settle a massive ongoing linguistic debate
in Ireland. Specifically, the debate over how
to spell the word crickick. That is a perfect
illustration of how a digitized archive changes
research. So for a bit of context for you listening,
the word crickick is ubiquitous in modern Irish
culture. It generally refers to news, gossip,
fun, or a good time. The common greeting is,
what's the crick? Right. And if you go to Ireland
today, or even an Irish pub in New York or Sydney,
you see it's spelled C -R -A -I -C on chalkboards
everywhere. It looks inherently traditional.
It does. It looks like an ancient Gaelic word.
Precisely. But linguists and historians have
long debated its actual origin. Right, because
there's a competing theory. Yes. A prominent
theory is that it was originally just the English
word crack. spelled C -R -A -C -K, meaning a
joke, a chat, or a boast. Which was widely used
in Northern England and Scotland, right? Exactly.
The argument goes that this English word was
adopted into Irish culture in the mid -20th century,
and then it was subsequently given a Gaelicized
spelling, C -R -A -I -C, to make it appear more
authentically, traditionally Irish. So they essentially
retrofitted the English word to look Irish. That's
the theory. But how do you actually prove that?
Because before a digital archive, I imagine you'd
just have academics arguing over their own subjective
memories. Or you'd have some poor grad students
spending three years in a basement. Yeah. Manually
reading thousands of physical pages hoping to
spot the word. Exactly. The manual search methodology
for a linguistic shift like that is almost impossible.
You just can't read enough pages fast enough.
Right. But with the INA, the methodology completely
changes. You have a search bar. The ultimate
tool. The journalists could query both spellings
across millions of pages of print media and just
filter by decade. Oh, that's brilliant. They
could track exactly when the CRACK spelling was
prevalent in certain contexts and pinpoint the
exact decade when the CRAIC spelling began to
emerge and eventually dominate the print landscape.
It turns 250 years of subjective cultural memory
into an objective searchable, quantifiable data
set. It does. I love that. It takes this highly
abstract linguistic concept and provides hard
printed proof. And it really connects back to
you, the listener. How so? It proves that this
kind of database isn't just some sterile playground
for academics writing peer reviewed papers that
no one will ever read. It's a highly practical,
modern tool. Very true. You can use it to settle
a pub debate about the origins of a slang word.
You can use it to trace your own family tree,
looking up marriage announcements from the 1800s.
hundreds. Irish genealogy research is a huge
use case for this. Huge. It takes the esoteric
concept of history and makes it incredibly functional
for everyday curiosity. And we shouldn't gloss
over the technological leap required to make
that functional curiosity possible. You mean
the search function itself. Yes. You mentioned
typing a word into a search bar. For a computer
to recognize the word Craig on a newspaper from
1960, or a completely different word on a broadsheet
from 1738, it relies on optical character recognition.
OCR. OCR, yes. Right, because the archive isn't
just a collection of photographs of old newspapers.
If it were just photos, you couldn't search the
text. Exactly. A photo is just pixels to a computer.
It doesn't know there are letters in it. So how
does the OCR handle something as old as a 1738
broadsheet? I'm imagining the typography back
then was wildly inconsistent. It is an immense
technical hurdle. I bet. OCR software has to
scan an image of a page and essentially guess
what letters are present based on their shapes.
Okay. When you are dealing with modern, crisp,
digital -born text, it's easy. But an 18th century
broadsheet... presents nightmares for an algorithm.
Because the paper is degrading. Yes, the paper
itself is often degraded, wrinkled, or torn.
The ink from the printing press might have bled
through from the other side of the page, creating
confusing shapes. Oh, I hadn't even thought of
that, the ghosting effect. Exactly. And the fonts
are archaic. For instance, in older English and
Irish printing, they used the long S. The long
S? Yes, it was a version of the lower cases that
looks almost identical to a lowercase f. Oh,
right, with the word house. Looks like half with
an F. Yes. I can see how an algorithm would completely
panic trying to read that. Precisely. So the
OCR technology has to be highly specialized.
It has to be constantly refined to understand
the historical context of the typography. It
has to learn history to read history. In a way,
yes. It has to learn to ignore ink splatters
and to interpret the varying column structures
of centuries of different publishing standards.
Because newspapers didn't always look like they
do today. Exactly. The fact that you can type
a word and search across 260 publications instantly
is the result of massive computational effort
layered over decades of manual preservation.
Which brings us to a really crucial point about
the INA. The origin. Yes. Because this massive
infrastructure, this incredible tech achievement,
it didn't originate in Silicon Valley. No, it
didn't. And this might be my favorite part of
the entire deep dive because it defies all modern
expectations of how big data is built. It really
does. When we think of a database containing
millions upon millions of searchable assets,
we assume it's owned by a massive, faceless tech
conglomerate. With billions in venture capital.
Right. And Sero Farms the size of small cities.
But the origins of the INA trace back to the
1960s. And it started entirely as a family enterprise.
It's a remarkably grounded origin story. Tell
me about Alan Martin. So the foundation of what
would eventually become this vast digital network
was laid by a man named Alan Martin. In the 1960s,
he founded a company called National Micropublishing.
OK. Their core business wasn't data. It was physical
preservation. They provided microfilming services
for newspaper publishers and libraries across
Ireland. Microfilm. Wow. Yes. For anyone who
hasn't had the distinct pleasure of wrestling
with a microfilm machine in a public library,
it is a very tactile experience. Oh, the film.
You've got these little spools of film and you
have to thread them through this heavy clunky
machine, usually under this harsh glowing light.
And if you thread it wrong, it goes everywhere.
Yes. and you turn this mechanical crank to advance
the film, and the pages just whip past on the
screen. It was revolutionary at the time. It
was a very physical, manual process to read it.
And the creation of that microfilm was even more
physical. How so? We really have to appreciate
the sheer labor involved in the 1960s. Alan Martin
and his team were dealing with massive, physically
-bound volumes of broadsheet newspapers. And
I am books of newspapers. Exactly. And many of
these volumes were already over a century old
at that point. So they were delicate. Very. The
paper was highly acidic, brittle, and actively
deteriorating. Wow. They had to turn each page
by hand, lay it flat under glass, and photograph
it frame by frame onto rolls of film. Frame by
frame, one click at a time. One click at a time.
They were doing the gritty, unglamorous work
of preservation decades before the internet was
even a concept. That is incredible foresight.
They recognized that if these papers weren't
captured on film, they would inevitably be lost
to fire, dampness, or simple chemical decay.
So they spent decades doing this incredibly meticulous
manual labor. They built this massive repository
of microfilms. Millions of frames. Millions.
But then we hit a massive chronological pivot.
As we move into the early 2000s, specifically
between 2001 and 2003, the business shifts. It
is established as a subsidiary of National Micromedia
LTD by Andrew Martin and his family. Alan's son.
Right. And they clearly saw the writing on the
wall. Microfilm was not the end game. It's a
classic and frankly rare example of an analog
business successfully surviving a profound technological
paradigm shift. It really is rare. Think of how
many companies rooted in physical media like
film photography or video rentals simply collapsed
when digital technology arrived. Blockbuster
comes to mind immediately. Exactly. But the Martin
family understood that their core asset wasn't
the physical microfilm itself. It was the information
captured on the film. So between 2001 and 2003,
they began the monumental transition from an
analog service company to a digital data company.
Which means scanning the microfilm. Yes. They
started the process of taking decades of physical
microfilm and scanning it into digital images
to be processed by that OCR technology we discussed.
Which is a massive risk. changing your business
model. It was a huge undertaking. But it paid
off because by 2009, the official online platform
for the Irish Newspaper Archives launches. The
first iteration of what we see today. And bringing
it up to the present day, what strikes me as
truly remarkable is the ownership structure.
It's still in the family. Yes. According to the
sources, it remains completely independent. It
is still family run. It's managed by Alan Martin's
sons, Andrew and Jonathan, their mother Annette,
and Phil Martin. The rarity of that structure
in today's data landscape is profound. Really
is. We live in an era where global information
is rapidly consolidated into the hands of a few
multinational corporations. The big tech giants.
Yet here, you have a colossal, nationally significant
archive. The collective memory of an entire nation
and its diaspora. and it is stewarded by a single
family. That's almost poetic. They have bridged
multiple generations and multiple technological
epochs from highly degradable physical paper
to analog microfilm to a fully integrated searchable
digital database. It requires a staggering amount
of long -term vision to maintain independence
over half a century in this industry. It really
does. I find the philosophy of that fascinating.
A single family holding the digital keys to the
daily lived experiences of millions of people.
It's a heavy responsibility. But that leads us
to a really thorny issue. Right. Because as much
as this is a labor of love and a mission of historical
preservation, national micro media is a commercial
enterprise. Yes, they're our business. Digitizing
millions of pages, running OCR software and keeping
high bandwidth servers online, $2 .47 is incredibly
expensive. The cloud isn't free. Exactly. So
how do they actually pay for it? The economics
of archiving is always a complex balancing act.
I imagine so. You are constantly weighing the
public's right to access their own history against
the hard capitalist reality of infrastructure
costs. Right. The INA navigates this through
a dual access model. Based on the source material,
the first tier is based on geographical and institutional
subsidization. OK, break that down for me. They
provide subscription free access to users who
are physically located in Irish public life.
libraries, universities, and secondary schools.
Okay, so if you are a teenager in Cork working
on a history project, or just a retired person
who walks into a public library in Galway, You
can sit down at a computer and access this entire
250 year database without swiping a credit card.
Exactly. The barrier to entry for the domestic
public within those institutions is zero. It's
amazing. It is. However, the servers still need
to be paid for. So the second tier of the model
is commercial access. This is designed for individual
researchers, genealogists, and the diaspora who
want to use the database from the comfort of
their own homes or from outside of Ireland entirely.
Okay. So home access is paid? Yes. As of the
year 2025, a 12 -month gold membership costs
$169 ,000. OK. Alternatively, there is a one
-month rolling gold membership for 18 .25 per
month, which works out to 219 euro annually if
you kept it running for a full year. OK. I want
to play devil's advocate here for a second. Because
169 euro for a year. For casual hobbyist, that
feels like a relatively steep paywall. It's an
investment, certainly. Isn't history supposed
to belong to everyone? I can imagine some people
arguing that locking the public record behind
a commercial paywall for home users is somewhat
restrictive. How does the INA justify that cost
to the individual user? It's a completely valid
critique, and it's a tension that exists in almost
every major digital archive globally. It's not
just them. No, but the justification lies in
the unseen labor of the digital transition. The
unseen labor. Yes. If these papers simply sat
in a physical vault, yes, they are technically
free to look at, assuming you can get to the
vault. Right. But to make them searchable from
your couch in Sydney or New York requires constant
capital. The OCR algorithms must be continuously
updated to handle complex historical fonts. Like
the long is. Exactly. And the server architecture
to deliver high resolution images instantly across
the globe is incredibly expensive. So the 169
euros is paying for the convenience of the digital
infrastructure. Precisely. In essence, the individual
genealogists and international researchers who
pay that 169 euros are heavily subsidizing the
free access provided to the public libraries
and schools in Ireland. That makes perfect sense.
It's essentially a redistribution model. It is.
And when you reframe the cost against the alternative,
it really changes the perspective. There is an
article by John Burns in the Times from our sources.
Oh, the one about the living room. Yes. The headline
is, using the Irish newspaper archives, 250 years
worth of news in your living room. A great way
to frame it. If you are a serious genealogist
living in Chicago trying to trace your ancestors
in County Kerry, what is your alternative to
paying the 169 euro? The alternative is entirely
prohibitive for most people. You'd have to fly
there. You would have to purchase transatlantic
flights. You would have to book a hotel in Dublin
or Kerry. You would need to take significant
time off work. And even when you get there, the
research isn't easy. No. You would have to navigate
the limited opening hours of physical archival
reading rooms. You'd request the physical microfilm
reels. And then spend days, perhaps weeks, manually
spinning those reels, hoping to stumble across
a surname. Hoping being the operative word. Yes.
When you calculate the raw financial cost and
the sheer volume of time required for the analog
method, the 169 subscription isn't just a fee
for access. It's a discount. It is an incredibly
steep discount on time and logistics. You are
paying a convenience fee to collapse geography
and time. It's a time machine tax. That's a good
way to put it. And honestly, when you put it
like that, It's a bargain. And it's important
to note that the 169 euro isn't just paying for
a static product. No, it's constantly growing.
It's not a finished vault they locked up in 2009.
The archive is continuously expanding. Weekly,
in fact. Right. The sources explicitly note that
current newspapers are updated on a weekly basis,
effectively archiving the present moment in real
time. Which is vital for future historians. But
they're also constantly delving deeper into the
past. which leads us to the massive expansions
that took place in 2025. The recent updates were
significant. They didn't just casually add a
few missing pages. They brought entirely new
historical titles online and massively updated
the runs of existing ones. The 2025 expansions
are a perfect example of how an archive continues
to refine its value over time. Let's talk about
some of the specific titles. Sure. They brought
several newly digitized titles online. For example,
they added the Monarch and Argus, covering the
mid -century period from 1949 to 1970. Okay,
good post -war local coverage. Exactly. But perhaps
more significantly, they added the Mayo Examiner,
which covers a highly specific and volatile window
from 1868 to 1876. I'm going to zoom in on that
Mayo Examiner edition. It's an important one.
Because 1868 to 1876 in County Mayo is not just
a random string of dates. No, it's a critical
period. That is right in the heart of the post
famine era. You are looking at a period of intense
agrarian unrest, the beginnings of the land war,
massive waves of forced immigration to the United
States and Britain, and just profound trauma
in the west of Ireland. Precisely. And that is
why digitizing that specific local paper is so
critical. Going back to the micro -history idea.
Yes. A national paper printed in Dublin in 1870
might report on the policies of the British Parliament
regarding Irish land reform from a very detached
administrative perspective. Like reading a legal
briefing. Right. But the Mayo Examiner is reporting
from the epicenter of the crisis. It's on the
ground. It is reporting on the actual evictions
taking place down the road. It is printing the
names of the families boarding the ships. It
captures the raw, unfilty tone of a community
fighting for its literal survival. That must
be intense to read. It is. When you give historians
and the public access to that local perspective,
it forces a reevaluation of the macro -historical
narrative. It adds a level of human desperation
and resilience that formal government records
completely lack. And it wasn't just Mayo that
got a massive update in 2025. No, Roscommon got
a lot of attention. There was what we can only
describe as a massive influx of history for County
Roscommon. It seems like the archivists just
decided to entirely map out the lineage of that
specific region. The Roscommon update is staggering
in its scope. Run through the titles for me.
They added the Roscommon Champion, which covers
the modern transition from 1944 all the way to
2010. Wow, over 60 years right there. But they
also went deep into the 19th century. They added
the Roscommon and Latrum Gazette, covering 60
years from 1822 to 1882. And the Roscommon Journal,
which stands nearly a century. from 1828 to 1927.
That is a massive block of time. On top of that,
they updated the major runs of the Roscommon
messenger. So if you have family roots in Roscommon,
or if you are an academic studying the socioeconomic
development of that specific county, yes, the
INA. just essentially handed you the Holy Grail.
You can track a single -family farm, a single
local business, or the shifting political allegiances
of one town continuously from 1822 to 2010. That
continuous thread is the true power of the database.
And it wasn't limited to the West, right? No.
The 2025 updates also included major runs through
to the present day for the Argus in Louth, the
Belfast Telegraph in the North, the Bray People
on the East Coast, and the Corkmen in the South.
So they are really covering the whole island.
They are actively trying to ensure that every
corner of the island has if microhistory represented
and easily searchable. But ensuring that representation
is actually incredibly difficult, right? Very
difficult. Because local papers, historically,
were printed on the absolute cheapest paper available.
Lowest quality newsprint. They were printed in
small batches. They were meant to be read on
a Friday and used to light the fire on a Saturday.
Or wrap fish and chips. Exactly. They weren't
carefully bound and stored in climate -controlled
vaults by the people who bought them, which makes
preserving them a bit of a scramble. It's a constant
race against time. And this leads me to a really
fascinating call to action that I found in our
sources. It is an article by Anthony Neeson in
the Irish Echo. Ah, the bat signal. Yes. The
headline literally reads, Sitting on a horde
of Irish Echo past copies. If so, we want to
hear from you. That headline exposes the reality
of how archival work actually functions in practice.
Which is not as neat and tidy as we think. No,
we tend to view archives as absolute authorities,
assuming they possess a pristine, unbroken record
of everything ever published. Right, you assume
the library just has a copy of everything. The
truth is much messier. The historical record
is incredibly fragile and full of holes. Stuff
gets lost. Publishers' offices burn down. Floods
destroy basements. Microfilm degrades. Even with
all the technology at the Martin family's disposal,
there are simply issues of newspapers that have
vanished from the official institutional record.
So they have to turn to the public. They have
no other choice. They are literally crowdsourcing
the past. They are putting out this bat signal,
hoping that someone, somewhere, is cleaning out
an attic and finds a stack of newspapers from
1954 that the archive happens to be missing.
It underscores that preservation is an active
collaborative hunt. It isn't just the responsibility
of an archivist in a lab coat. It's on all of
us. The physical objects that contain our history
often survive by sheer luck. A stack of papers
used as insulation in the walls of an old house.
A box forgotten in a damp basement for three
generations. It's kind of beautiful when you
think about it. It is. When a publication like
the Irish Echo puts out a call asking the public
to check their attics, it's an acknowledgement
that the definitive record of a community might
currently be sitting in a cardboard box next
to someone's holiday decorations. That is such
a vivid image. Every time an ordinary citizen
answers that call, they are participating in
a rescue mission for their own cultural heritage.
A rescue mission. I think that is the perfect
way to encapsulate this entire deep dive. It
really is. So what does this all mean when we
pull it all together? Well, the INA is more than
just data. Right. The Irish newspaper archives
is far more than just a commercial website you
visit to look up a date or find an old obituary
It is a 250 year old living breathing document
of Ireland and its massive global diaspora a
testament to dedication a testament to the stubborn
foresight of a single family The Martins, who
spent decades painstakingly photographing brittle
pages in the 1960s and then had the business
acumen to successfully pivot that massive physical
undertaking into a sleek, searchable digital
platform. They bridged the gap. They built a
bridge. They took the rigorous, inaccessible
world of academic research and piped it directly
into your living room. It democratizes the data.
It settles linguistic debates with hard evidence.
And it ensures that the localized everyday voices
from centuries past are not completely swallowed
by the macro narratives of textbooks. It is undeniably
a monumental achievement in the field of historical
preservation. Absolutely. But if we connect this
to the bigger picture, it raises a fairly provocative
question for you, the listener. Let's hear it.
We have just spent this time exploring how a
family -run enterprise managed to digitize the
collective memory of a nation, and how they often
rely on the absolute luck of physical documents
surviving in attics and basements. Right. So
consider your own physical space. What invaluable
history is currently degrading in your own attic?
Oh, that's a great question. Are there bundles
of letters, obscure local community newsletters,
self -published zines from the 1990s, or unlabeled
family photographs that represent the missing
pieces of a much larger narrative? Things you
might just toss out without thinking. Exactly.
Are you currently the unwitting custodian of
primary source documents just waiting for someone
to preserve them before they are thrown in a
dumpster? It really makes you think. The reality
is the archives of the future rely entirely on
what we make the conscious decision to save today.
That is a brilliant point to end on. It definitely
makes you look at that dusty box of papers in
the garage with a bit more respect. Don't throw
it out. Do not just throw it away without looking
through it first. You might be holding the key
to a missing chapter of history. You never know.
Thank you so much for joining us on this deep
dive. We know there is an overwhelming amount
of information out there, and our goal is always
to cut through that noise to find the brilliant
insights underneath. Keep exploring, keep questioning,
and we will catch you on the next deep dive.