STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse
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stemma.bsky.social
STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse
@stemma.bsky.social
An ERC-funded project led by Prof. Erin McCarthy and based at the University of Galway. We are building the first large-scale computational model of the circulation of early modern verse in manuscript from 1475-1700. https://stemma.universityofgalway.ie
An fun Friday observation from one of our Researchers – this wonderful little CELM entry describes John Evelyn’s “Note of the Books, Prints, Letters, Mapps, [etc.,]” that he lent Samuel Pepys with the important note “to be all returned me againe.” Every book owner has that one friend! 😂
August 15, 2025 at 4:28 PM
Some of our participants from the hackathon last month sat down to chat with our friends at @portershed.bsky.social about the project and their work during the hack - keep your eyes peeled for the footage!

But how better to start than to learn more about STEMMA from @erinannmcc.bsky.social herself?
August 7, 2025 at 9:09 AM
Team 8 is isolating the circulation and arrangement of John Donne’s Satires as a trial run for analysing clusters of poetry in the dataset! #ERCFunded #STEMMAhackathon
July 8, 2025 at 12:48 PM
Team 6 is employing vector embeddings to perform sentiment analysis on manuscript collections! #ERCFunded #STEMMAhackathon
July 8, 2025 at 12:44 PM
Team 5 is using the poems of Philip Sidney as a case study of poem popularity over time! #ERCfunded #STEMMAhackathon
July 8, 2025 at 12:43 PM
Team 4 is taking a deep dive on post-1700 content to see whose work gets perpetuated into the century beyond our data set! #ERCfunded #STEMMAhackathon
July 8, 2025 at 12:40 PM
Team 3 is working on a method to identify poems and poem groups shared between manuscripts to aid in finding patterns and clusters of poems! #ERCfunded #STEMMAhackathon
July 8, 2025 at 12:38 PM
Team 2 is generating poem stability scores to analyse degrees of variation in the first lines of poems in the STEMMA database! #ERCfunded #STEMMAhackathon
July 8, 2025 at 12:31 PM
Here’s a brief showcase of some of the great work going on at the hackathon this week! Team 1 is measuring popularity by calculating the copies of a poem over time alongside its number of unique manuscript locations to find the manuscripts that contain the most popular poems in our data! #ERCfunded
July 8, 2025 at 12:28 PM
Delighted to be joined remotely by Prof. Jing Chen from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University to talk to us about her fabulous project building a database of classical Chinese poetry to study circulation - STEMMA can relate! #STEMMAhackathon #DH
July 8, 2025 at 9:32 AM
Working on initial prototyping as we near the end of Hackathon Day 1! @researchireland.ie @uniofgalway.bsky.social #STEMMAhackathon #DH
July 7, 2025 at 2:51 PM
Team 4 working on our top secret #STEMMAhackathon project. #DH #ERCfunded
July 7, 2025 at 1:04 PM
@erinannmcc.bsky.social kicking off this week's STEMMA hackathon @portershed.bsky.social! Excited to be hosting such a vibrant community of developers, scholars, and stakeholders!
July 7, 2025 at 12:23 PM
Kicking off the STEMMA hackathon here at The Portershed in Galway with a Design Thinking talk for our hackers! @erc.europa.eu @researchireland.ie @portershed.bsky.social #STEMMAhackathon #DH #ERCfunded
July 7, 2025 at 9:20 AM
June 18, 2025 at 7:39 AM
Vectors are cool kids
March 21, 2025 at 2:08 PM
Our fearless leader @erinannmcc.bsky.social speaking about STEMMA and 'AI and Early Modern Poetry' this morning at RSA! #RSA2025
March 21, 2025 at 1:52 PM
Then it's back to @caitlinburge.bsky.social for John Heywood's critique (!!) of Thomas Cromwell in "Play of the Wether" in part one of Rebecca Bushnell's two-part seminar on "Magic, Science, Knowledge, and Popular Belief."
March 18, 2025 at 9:56 AM
Next, @erinannmcc.bsky.social will discuss Anne Southwell's networks (and some possible ridiculograms) as part of the #Shax2025 seminar "Anne Southwell and Early Modernisms," led by Victoria Burke, @rhetorician.bsky.social, and @luckyj1.bsky.social.
March 18, 2025 at 9:53 AM
It’s past time for someone to write about early modern cheese poems (Bodl. Rawl. poet. 26, f. 61r) 🧀
March 3, 2025 at 5:47 PM
This is incredible. For some reason, that cat kind of reminds me of Daniel Tiger in King Friday XIII's castle (the puppet versions, obvs).
February 24, 2025 at 1:06 PM
Happy Family Day to all our colleagues in Canada! Did you know that John Donne’s grandfather, John Heywood, was also a poet, as well as a playwright and musician serving in four royal courts from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I? Their poems even appear together in at least one Early Modern Manuscript!
February 17, 2025 at 11:27 AM
Today's the day! Come along for a bit of early modern flirting... 12pm in the Hardiman Building! @millie-ran.bsky.social @campsgalway.bsky.social
January 31, 2025 at 8:54 AM
When a beautifully ordered and alphabetised table is followed by a couple of pages titled 'These Songs Following were writt out After I Finished ye First Table'
We've all been there 🤦‍♀️ #transcriptiontuesday
- A collection of music books, MS.M.5.S, York Minster
November 19, 2024 at 11:11 AM
It's a big day for STEMMA: all of our data sources have been imported into our database! 🥳

Thanks to our partners at Ember Technology for all of their work on this. Roll on, data reconciliation!
May 16, 2024 at 10:48 AM