News Archive
2010 Humanities Serving Irish Society Annual Conference
The annual HSIS conference was hosted by An Foras Feasa at NUI Maynooth on Thursday 4th and Friday 5th February. An Foras Feasa is chair of the national consortium for the academic year 2009-2010.
The focus of the workshop was on early-career researchers funded by the HSIS consortium and presentations were made by eighteeen post-doctoral researchers from ten third-level institutions: DkIT, DCU, NUI Galway, NUI Maynooth, SPCD, TCD, UCC, UCD, UL and University of Ulster. The conference also featured presentations by two representatives of the European Science Foundation, Dr Arianna Ciula and Dr Marko Tadic, on funding opportunities and current developments in research infrastructures in the humanities; by Dr John Keating and Ms Aja Teehan (An Foras Feasa) on ‘Engineering Human-Usable Documents’; and by Mr Shawn Day from the Digital Humanities Observatory, along with an exhibition of doctoral posters. Over 80 people attended the two-day conference, and it underlined the rich, diverse and innovative work supported by the Humanities Serving Irish Society consortium.
Session 1
Dr Jason McHugh - An Foras Feasa/SPCD
Creating a Clerical Database: Sources, Methods, Problems and Successes
This paper describes a project currently in progress under An Foras Feasa in the 'Irish in Europe' research stream. Concentrating on the Catholic bishops and clerics who operated between Ireland and the continent in the seventeenth century, it aims to construct a database of prosopographical, bibliographical and literary material for the study of this group. This paper examines some of the problems and successes associated with the creation of this database and explores ways in which ICT can help historians utilise it as a research tool.
Dr Catherine Morris - John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies, UCD
Discovering Alice Milligan: From Archives to Exhibition
Alice Milligan (1866 to 1953) was a prolific writer, journalist and a life long social activist who founded several cultural and political organisations (including the anti-Partition Council in the 1930s). As a northern protestant Irish woman who renounced the political unionism of her upbringing to become a radical nationalist, Milligan was like Francis Ledgewidge in Heaney poem, a figure in whom “all the strains criss cross”. In this talk I will explore the different official and unofficial archives I drew upon to uncover the forgotten story of Alice Milligan’s career. My book project and National Library Exhibition is about mapping a culture in formation. I will argue that visual culture in this period of radical transformation offered a site for the rehearsal and performance of possible identities. Irish public space was reclaimed and redefined during the Revival in print culture, in performances enacted on official and unofficial stages, in the opening up of theatres, galleries and cinemas. I will show how my investigation of this political mobilisation of visual culture involved research into a wide range of archival materials such as: photographs (nicknamed 'the mirror with a memory' in the 1890s), magic lantern slides and travelling lantern shows, illustrated fiction, illustrations carried by newspapers and journals, tableaux vivant, 'pictures' contained within Irish melodramas, public commemorations, costumed pageants, banners carried at public demonstrations, murals, paintings and public monuments, sculpture and film reels. I will discuss how I re-discovered an integral aspect of Irish cultural history by looking at a range of official and unofficial archives as well as by interviewing people who knew Milligan, by delivering public talks in community centers across the North, by searching secret police files, newspapers, letters, and tracing family papers.
Dr Robin Kavanagh - An Foras Feasa/NUIM
Using Visual Resources Association (VRA Core 4.0) for Irish INC Image Metadata
Under the An Foras Feasa 'ICT Innovation and Digital Humanities Stream', this project is creating an online database research tool to provide enhanced user access to a large corpus of visual images from unknown or lesser-known Irish illustrated periodicals published in the nineteenth century. The source material for this project was carefully chosen from selected collections housed in the Russell Library, Maynooth. This paper will explain our project choice of VRA core 4.0 for cataloging our image metadata. It consists of a metadata element set that offers the best categorical organization for the description of works of visual culture and the images that document them. VRA Core is in concert with CCO guideline (Cataloging of Cultural Objects), it is the choice of the cultural heritage community and it suited our sources.
This project will become An Foras Feasa's newest innovative end-user interactive Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to provide enhanced accessibility to a wide variety of Irish images; encourage better understanding of the original work through enhancement and contextualization information; provide innovative search and retrieval technology for superior user interface; create an interdisciplinary resource tool for teaching and learning; assist in the conservation of the archival source originals. This innovative An Foras Feasa digital humanities project will rescue these important visual images from a fate of anonymity and allow researchers to analyze and decide what contribution they made to Irish cultural identity.
Session 2
Brigid Clesham - Moore Institute, NUIG
Landed Estates Project c.1700-c.1920
Landed Estates Project - its aim, compilation and present status. The landed estates' database project aims to compile a listing of landed estates in the provinces of Connacht and Munster in the 18th and 19th centuries and to identify the sources both primary and secondary for their further study. Brief histories and the location of country houses associated with these estates are also included in the database. The first phase of the project covering Connacht is complete and can be accessed at www.landedestates.ie <http://www.landedestates.ie/> The second phase covering Munster is due for completion in the summer of 2011.
Dr Laura McAtackney - John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies, UCD
Identity and Memory at Long Kesh/Maze Prison, Northern Ireland
Long Kesh/Maze prison is a physically inauspicious landscape – a grey collection of institutional buildings and ‘footprints’ of dismantled huts clustered on the side of a motorway. However, closer examination of the physical remains and external relationships of the prison reveals evidence of complex and evolving connections with place that continue to pervade a site that was a significant actor during the course of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’. This paper aims to use an interdisciplinary methodology to relate how an institutional environment has become a site of memory inextricably linked to individual and communal identities for some former inhabitants and their wider communities.
Dr Johanna Archbold - Long Room Hub/TCD
‘Creativity, the City & the University: Cultural Collaboration Initiative’
Abstract: The Cultural Collaboration Initiative is the main project ongoing under Trinity’s Long Room Hub’s research theme ‘Creativity, the City & the University’. It is a collaborative project between Trinity College Dublin and six cultural institutions, the National Library of Ireland, National Gallery of Ireland, National Museum of Ireland, Chester Beatty Library, Dublin City Library and Archives and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. The report arising from the project ‘Collaboration and Synergies between Libraries, Museums and Galleries and the University’ addresses the historical and current connections between the College and the institutions and addresses areas of potential future synergies. The research questions also address the international models of interest which provide salient contexts for this Dublin study and highlights further international networks to which this research will be relevant.
Dr Georgina Laragy - ISKS/University of Limerick
Lifecycles in Modern Ireland
This paper will outline the experience of establishing a Digital Imaging Station in the Killarney Mental Hospital in the Summer of 2009 and compare it to the problems encountered in a general hospital in Croom, Co Limerick. It will also describe the archival material that was digitised and explore how it has been transformed into a database which provides historians with the ability to examine the 20th Century psychiatric hospital experience quantitatively and qualitatively.
Session 3
Dr Ian Wilson - An Foras Feasa, DKIT
Re-Contextualizing Tradition
This paper will outline the results of my most recent research into performative gestures found in traditional Irish sean-nós singing. The purpose of my research is to examine and exemplify how aspects of traditional Irish performance practice can be used as the basis of new, contemporary works of art music. The first stage of my research has involved my absorption of the gestural language of the Slow Air and subsequent writing of new tunes for sean-nós singer Lorcán Mac Mathúna. These new melodies have then been set in an original and innovative context provided by improvising saxophonist Cathal Roche and myself manipulating Mac Mathúna’s singing with live electronics.
I will play some audio examples of these results and discuss a number of questions raised by them to do with authorship and collaboration, the traditional/contemporary interface, defining improvisational parameters and notions of permanence/impermanence and documentation in a fluid performance situation.
Dr Stefanie Lehner - John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies, UCD
Performing Reconciliation in Contemporary Northern Irish Cultural Productions
At least since South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ‘reconciliation’ has emerged as a newly hegemonic discourse governing political transition in the twenty-first century, as the peace process in Northern Ireland demonstrates. In Reconciliation After Violent Conflict, David Bloomfield argues that it ‘includes the search for truth, justice, forgiveness, healing and so on’. But whilst issues of truth and justice have been conspicuously absent from the negotiations that led to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, so far no systematic attempt at truth recovery has taken place in Northern Ireland. In the absence of an overarching institutional framework, the task of dealing with the so-called ‘legacy of the past’ has been devolved to independent initiatives and community projects as well as media and culture – with the 2006 BBC series Facing the Truth, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, David Park’s The Truth Commissioner (2008), and the 2009 BBC drama Five Minutes of Heaven, directed by Oliver Hischbiegel and written by Guy Hibbert, as some notable examples. If the recently released report of the Consultative Group on the Past (CGP), co-chaired by Lord Eames and Denis Bradley, aims ‘to find a way forward out of the shadows of the past’, the anger and outrage sparked by its recommendations, yet, attest to the disruptive potential that questions of truth and justice continue to have, which, this paper suggests, are enacted in Park’s novel and Hibbert’s drama. Considering both works part of the current ‘reconciliation industry’, I wish to explore the specific ways in which they negotiate and resolve such tensions.
De Juliana Adelman - Long Room Hub, TCD
MAN/imal: Exploring Human and Animal Relationships from the 19th to the 21st Century
My talk will briefly outline the development of my research on nineteenth-century attitudes towards nonhuman animals in Dublin. I will focus on ideas about animal intelligence, showing how it was linked to religious, scientific and lay notions about what qualities defined humans. I will then discuss an exhibition (HUMAN) which will be a future outcome of this research. The proposed interactive exhibition will examine current scientific debates about what it means to be human while drawing in comparisons to the past, derived from my research.
Dr Raymond Ryan - University College Cork
Bypassing the Tiger: Reflecting on Irish Economic Development
With the attention given to the recent economic recession and the period of growth that preceded it, the long-term nature of Irish economic development has been obscured.
This presentation argues that economic development in Ireland since the foundation of the state was generated through two factors. Firstly through structural change which was promoted by government policy and which would never have arisen through free market conditions. Secondly, demographic changes led to an increase in the percentage of the population gainfully employment; this being achieved through government action and societal change.
Session 4
Dr Barry Keane - CTTS (DCU) /An Foras Feasa
The Staging and Reception of Irish Drama in Poland in the Twentieth Century
As part of the project ‘Ireland in Europe’, coordinated by Prof. Michael Cronin, I am writing a book that looks at the staging and reception of Irish drama in Poland in the twentieth century. It is a work that provides a chronological narrative of a burgeoning interest in Ireland and Irish drama that took root in Poland in the early modernist era and which deepened over the course of the twentieth century. Here the symbolic importance of the perceived parallels of the Polish and Irish experience is explored. Integral to this is an investigation into the various historical circumstances in which the translation and staging of Irish drama took place in Poland. What is more, an additional part of the project aims to create a full bibliography of all Irish Literature in Polish translation in the 19th and 20th centuries for the Trasna online bibliography of Irish literature in translation.
Playboy of the Western World in Teatr Polski (The Polish Theatre), Warsaw, 1913.
Source: Tygodnik Ilustrowany (The Illustrated Week), no. 47, 1913 (II), p. 930. Photograph by J. Wêgrzyn
Dr Gabor Gelleri - Moore Institute, NUIG
The TTCE (Texts, Transmission and Cultural Exchange) Digitization Projects
TTCE is one of the branches of the Texts, Contexts, Culture training program. Two digitization projects are running under TTCE. The aim of the 'Ars Apodemica Online' project is to create an online database of early modern discussions of the means and goals of travel (the so-called ars apodemica), which appeared in substantial numbers across Europe. This project draws on the cumulative efforts of specialists around the world in order to create a new research tool, which will include full bibliographical records and, where possible, a full-text version of primary sources. The 'Ireland Illustrated' project creates a database of illustrated travel accounts of Ireland from 1650 to 1850, including digitization of a selection of representative images. We have ongoing cooperation with several related projects running in Europe in order to share standards and methodologies. While the main audience of this project is scholarly, it also takes into account the existence of a wider curiosity, national and international, generated by such a topic, and seeks ways of interacting with this public.
Dr Susan Cahill - John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies, UCD
“A Daughter of Erin”: Irish Women Writers of Children’s Fiction 1870-1920
This project aims to delineate a literary history of women’s writing for children in Ireland between 1880-1920, focusing on this period in order to explore the relationship between Irish children’s fiction and discourses of the emerging nation, and concentrating on girlhood due to the prevalent and lasting representation of ‘Ireland’ as female. The project will focus on women writers due to their neglect in critical material focusing on Irish children’s literature in which male writers such as Padraig Pearse, Patrick Colum, and Oscar Wilde are dominant. Critics such as Declan Kiberd and John Wilson Foster have noted the connections made by writers of the Irish Literary Revival between ideas of childhood and constructions of the nation as well as the importance of children’s writing to the Revival project, particularly in terms of the inculcation of heroic ideals through the promotion of Gaelic myths and legends and figures like Cuchulainn (Kiberd 1996, Foster 1987). However, much of this scholarship focuses on the reading practices and literary culture of young boys. The role of literature aimed specifically at girls of this period has been neglected despite Siobhán Kilfeather’s identification of a considerable increase in fiction for girls and young women in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Kilfeather 2002, 1142). Thus, this project’s investigation of the relationship between discourses of the nation and representations of the child, especially girls, is crucial to an understanding of both constructions of Irish childhood and the history of Irish children’s literature and I particularly want to focus on the ways in which children’s books from these periods map contemporary assumptions about femininity, Irishness, and childhood.
Dr Grigory Bondarenko - University of Ulster
Supplement to eDIL (Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language)
Supplement to eDIL (electronic Dictionary of the Irish language)'. The eDIL team is currently compiling a supplement to the Dictionary based on lexicographical work on Old and Middle Irish, mainly in journals, published since 1932 when the second fascicule of DIL appeared. This research will be published online as the work progresses. This project is due for completion in 2012. Supplement only is to be published as a hardcopy based on the supplement entries compiled. The paper gives an overview of the project and focuses on successes and challenges of the digital lexicography.
Humanities Serving Irish Society Annual Conference 
The second Annual Humanities Serving Irish Society (HSIS) Conference will be held in the Royal Irish Academy on 5-6 February 2009. Funded under PRTLI Cycle 4, the HSIS consortium represents a major inter-institutional research collaboration aimed at building a joint national platform for the dissemination of humanities research, teaching and training at an all-island level.
Professor Alan F. Smeaton will be delivering the keynote address at this year's conference, which will also include a poster session and a series of 20 minute presentations from individual researchers designed to showcase the range of work that is currently ongoing across the consortium. The HSIS International Advisory Panel (IAP) will also meet to hold a roundtable discussion on digital humanities. This promises to be an especially stimulating discussion given that the IAP is composed of several world leading authorities in the field of digital humanities including Dr Peter Doorn (DANS), Professor Willard McCarty (King's College, London), Professor Seamus Ross (NUI Maynooth), Dr Laurent Romary (Max Planck Institute) and Dr Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta).
The conference will conclude with a closed door business meeting of the HSIS Management Board.
For full conference programme please click here