A Digitisation Strategy for Cornish Historical Sources
Alice Thacker, King's College London
 |
 |
 |
This dissertation submitted for the MA in Digital Humanities examines how a digitisation strategy for Cornish historical sources could support future discourse around Cornish distinctiveness, particularly through cultural preservation, public access, research, education, and the Cornish language revival. Focusing on materials held by Kresen Kernow and related Cornish cultural institutions, the study argues that these sources are not only archival records but active resources for strengthening understanding of Cornwall’s recognised minority status, language heritage, and cultural identity. Many important manuscripts, maps, records, photographs, and multilingual texts remain accessible only through physical archive visits, limiting their value for local communities, researchers, educators, and wider global audiences.
The research uses a mixed-methods approach combining a public questionnaire, semi-structured stakeholder interviews, and content analysis of William Borlase’s Memorandums relating to the Cornish Tongue. This methodology connects public attitudes, expert priorities, and the material features of a key historical source. The questionnaire received 100 responses and showed strong support for digitisation, with respondents ranking preservation of fragile documents and increased accessibility as the most important benefits. The survey also revealed a distinction between Cornish identity and Cornish distinctiveness. While being born and raised in Cornwall was viewed as central to personal Cornish identity, broader elements such as history, language, landscape, festivals, and cultural practices were seen as contributing to Cornish distinctiveness. Although nearly all respondents were aware of the Cornish language, fewer knew that Cornish identity is formally recognised as a national minority.
Stakeholder interviews reinforced the importance of digitisation for research, teaching, language documentation, and public engagement. Participants from archival, academic, language, and cultural-policy contexts emphasised that physical access to fragile or uncatalogued materials is a major limitation. Some sources cannot be handled due to their condition, making digitisation the only practical route to access. Interviewees also highlighted that current digitisation efforts are fragmented and often shaped by funding, copyright, cataloguing gaps, and institutional capacity rather than by a coordinated long-term strategy.
The content analysis of Borlase’s manuscript demonstrates the need for a tailored digitisation model. The excerpt contains English and Cornish text, translations, religious material, footnotes, named individuals, references to other manuscripts, and evidence of historical language variation. These features make the source valuable for cultural history, linguistic research, education, and corpus-building, but they also create technical challenges. Digitisation must therefore go beyond scanning to include transcription, translation where needed, metadata creation, and markup that preserves textual structure and enables searchability.
The dissertation proposes a three-stage digitisation strategy. First, culturally and linguistically significant sources should be selected, scanned, transcribed, and translated where appropriate. Second, transcriptions should be encoded using interoperable formats such as XML to preserve structure, named entities, and searchable features. Third, digitised materials should be made available through a public-facing repository that maps sources across institutions and supports collaboration between archives, museums, researchers, and cultural organisations.
The study concludes that digitising Cornish historical sources is both necessary and feasible if guided by stakeholder needs, technical sustainability, and institutional cooperation. Such a strategy would preserve fragile materials, increase access, support Cornish language initiatives, enrich digital humanities research, and strengthen future conversations about Cornish distinctiveness.
This category is not included in the DPC Member vote.
The Award for the Most Distinguished Student Work in Digital Preservation follows a slightly different process, with the winner selected exclusively by the Awards Judges.