IRISH WOMEN OF THE 20TH CENTURY

• Author: John Breslin, Sarah-Anne Buckley
• Date: 19 December 2020
• Published date: 19 December 2020

Historic photographs offer us a window into this past, and the process of colourisation - as these historical photos of Irish women demonstrate - allow us to view it in a new way. The images are not a replacement for the original source but can lead the reader to it.

Drawn from the 2020 book Old Ireland in Colour - in which colour is added to existing black and white photos - they document both ordinary and extraordinary people, places and moments of modern Irish history, some that we know well and can now view with fresh eyes, others that we don't know at all.

The book is part of a wider project, a project that began in early 2019 when John Breslin - who carries out research at the Insight SFI centre for data analytics in NUI Galway - started to colourise family photographs as part of his own genealogy research.

He began using DeOldify - a computer-based AI system that colourises black and white photographs. After that stage, photos are brought into Photoshop to be adjusted and corrected based on additional research or knowledge. Documents...