Rewriting Tradition: Quantifying Change in Lady Gregory's Irish Legends

This repository contains the paper "Rewriting Tradition: Quantifying Change in Lady Gregory’s Irish Legends", presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal. The paper uses computational methods to analyse how Lady Augusta Gregory's translations of traditional Irish legends reimagined the original works for the purposes of aligning them with cultural nationalism and the Irish Literary Revivalist perspectives. Summary: This paper uses computational methods to explore the linguistic, thematic, and ideological shifts in Lady Augusta Gregory’s adaptations of traditional Irish legends. By examining her retellings alongside earlier translations of the same stories, this study highlights how Gregory’s works actively reframed Ireland’s mythological heritage to support her cultural nationalist aims. Her adaptations unify the narrative, foregrounding gendered, nationalist, and folkloric themes to foster a cohesive national identity that resonates with the ideals of the Irish Literary Revival. Through the use of word frequency analysis, sentiment analysis, and word embeddings, this paper offers new insights into Gregory’s pivotal role in shaping Irish identity, illustrating how her work blends the preservation of cultural heritage with the promotion of political ideals. Acknowledgements: This research is funded by CASCADE (101119511), a Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network funded by the European Union and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). https://www.horizoncascade.net/