Digital Humanities Exploratorium: Pathways to Interdisciplinarity, Creative Praxis and Digital Humanities Research
PROGRAMME 19th June 2013
SESSION 1: Creative Advocacy Strategies and Arts in Activism (11:15am - 1:00pm) Chair: Siobhán Clancy Panel: Katie Gillum, Fiona Whelan & Gillian O’ Connor, Taey Iohe
Katie Gillum Katie Gillum is an activist filmmaker and researcher using the Abortion Rights Campaign as a case study for examining how creativity in the form of participatory arts can broaden feminist discourse. Her multimedia work examines post-modernist theories of cyber-feminism in current activist contexts. Fiona Whelan & Gillian O’ Connor Policing Dialogues − A Case Study of a Long-term Interdisciplinary Project Exploring Neighbourhood Relations of Power Fiona Whelan is an artist concerned with issues of inequality and social justice. Her practice is collaborative and she has worked across sectors with one youth organization for over nine years steering a longitudinal site-specific enquiry that facilitates interdisciplinary learning. Her practice attends to both macro and micro environments - the local and situational as well as the political and social, developing work that is multifaceted and multivocal including reading events, film, dialogues, exhibitions and workshops. This has included the formation of the What’s the Story? Collective who are leading a four year project exploring power relations with multiple manifestations including Policing Dialogues at The LAB in 2010. For the past two years, Fiona has been the Course Coordinator of the Graduate Diploma in Community/ Arts/ Education at NCAD and part of a team developing the course into a new two year MA in Socially Engaged Art. Gillian O’ Connor is a Community Youth Worker in the Rialto Youth Project for the last nine years. She has a particular interest in music and has used this in her practice with young people in RYP. Presently, she is the coordinator of the Rialto Music Working Group which oversees the planning, reflection and delivery of the RYP music programme. As well as one to one, gender based groups and outreach, much of her work in the project has been collaborative with young people and various artists. She was also a Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
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Digital Humanities Exploratorium: Pathways to Interdisciplinarity, Creative Praxis and Digital Humanities Research
member of the What's the Story? Collective who developed a four-year project exploring power relations. She is currently working with EYE Public - a collective of young people, youth workers and artists exploring the experience and use of public space in Dolphin House. Gillian achieved her degree in Applied Social Studies from NUI Maynooth in 2004. Taey Iohe City, Resistance and Artistic Research Taey Iohe is an artist-scholar based in London, Seoul and Dublin. Her doctoral research examined the relationship between aesthetics and migration through an investigation of cultural translation in the case of a globalised economic and aesthetic space. She recently submitted her doctoral thesis (UCD, May 2013) which discusses a creative way of understanding migratory aesthetics; her work sets up an imaginary architecture to bring together the critical concepts and the practical tools of the artist in her art making. Her most recent publications and solo exhibitions include: Strangers in the Neighbourhood: The Cultural and Artistic Translation of Displacement (JOMEC Cultural Translation and East Asia special edition, forthcoming), Restless (Trunk Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, forthcoming). She holds a BA in English Literature and an MA in Interactive Media. She also has been working as a media consultant in the higher education sector for 10 years, including at Central Saint Martins, MIT Europe, the University of Surrey, and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She will give a working paper, titled City, Resistance and Artistic Research; this deals with the socio political implications of artistic activities using screen media. http://www.taey.com
SESSION 2: Urban Interventions (2:00pm-3:45pm) Chair: Dr Madeleine Lyes Panel: Ailbhe Murphy and Ciaran Smyth (Vagabond Reviews) Dr Alice Feldman, Eilis Murphy (Uncommon Land)
Ailbhe Murphy and Ciaran Smyth (Vagabond Reviews) City (Re)searches: Experiences of Being Public Co-founded in 2007 by artist Ailbhe Murphy and independent researcher Ciaran Smyth, Vagabond Reviews is an interdisciplinary platform combining socially engaged art and research practice. Projects include the Cultural Archaeology (2009-2010), a community-based arts research initiative in collaboration
Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
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Digital Humanities Exploratorium: Pathways to Interdisciplinarity, Creative Praxis and Digital Humanities Research
with Fatima Groups United, Rialto. The Sliabh Bán Art House (2011- 2012) a participatory public art project commissioned by Galway City Council’s Arts Office and City (Re)Searches Experiences of Being Public, an interdisciplinary research initiative produced by Blue Drum, Community Arts Partnership Belfast and the Kaunas Biennial. Vagabond Reviews is currently developing a work entitled the (In)Visible Labour Factorium as part of the National Women’s Council of Ireland Legacy Project. Curated by Valerie Connor, the Legacy Project sets out to challenge mainstream representations of women and examine historical and contemporary ideas about work, society, and economy as well as advocacy and legacy building. Dr Alice Feldman Rendering, Knowing, Speaking: The Politics of Creative Research Practice Alice Feldman is a lecturer in the School of Sociology, Co-Director of the Migration and Citizenship Research Initiative and Coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Degree in International Migration and Social Cohesion at University College Dublin. Through the use of creative, arts-based and participatory methods, her work explores the multiple and intersecting marginalities underpinning the construction of otherness among and across ‘indigenes’ and ‘migrants’ in the spaces and places of the nation and everyday life. She has served in a variety of research and advisory capacities with a number of NGOs and agencies in Ireland involved in interculturalism and integration work. Eilis Murphy Uncommon Land – Where public is private: An urban intervention into privatised ‘public’ spaces in Ireland Eilis Murphy is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores people’s interactions, memories and their relationship to specific spaces within a community. Mapping plays a central role in her work; working as a base to examine hidden narratives, power structures or values that underpin and meld together a locality or community. Her work is often site-specific resulting from a lengthy period of research in which she gathers information through drawing, photography, audio and visual interviews, online and library archives and on-site visits. She recently completed the Arts, Participation and Development course (Hetac Level 8) with Cork Institute of Technology and Mayfield Arts Centre and holds a first class BA in Fine Art Print with the National College of Art and Design. http://www.eilismurphy.com and http://uncommonland.wordpress.com.
Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
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Digital Humanities Exploratorium: Pathways to Interdisciplinarity, Creative Praxis and Digital Humanities Research
SESSION 3: Migration, Displacement and Creative Praxis (4:00pm-5:30pm) Chair: Dr Anne Mulhall Panel: Asylum Archive, Owen Boss (ANU Productions), Dr Alan Grossman
Asylum Archive The Asylum archive project is based on the experience of being an asylum seeker and living in direct provision hostels. Asylum archive uses contemporary art language in the form of social documentaries, videos, photography, found objects, and text. Asylum archive aims to collaborate with asylum seekers, artists, cultural workers, sociologists, human rights workers, social activists, theorists, and immigration lawyers and in the process seeks to create a platform that deals with questions like exile and asylum, displacement, war traumas, transnational migration, economic migration, and immigration policy. http://www.asylumarchive.com Owen Boss (ANU Productions) Owen holds a Masters of Fine Art at the National College of Art and Design. Exhibitions include A Yellow Rose, the Free Mason’s Grand Lodge (2012), Contemporary Art and the Moving Image (2011), Life with Edits, the Joinery Dublin (2011), and et al. As Co-Artistic Director of ANU Productions, Owen’s work includes: Boys of Foley Street (Dublin Theatre Festival 2012), Laundry (Dublin Theatre Festival 2011), World's End Lane (Re-Viewed - Dublin Theatre Festival 2011, Absolut Fringe 2010,), Fingal Ronan (Robert Wilson Watermill Center New York 2010), Basin (Dublin Fringe Festival 2009), and Corners (Project Arts Centre, 2009). Owen has recently been awarded an Arts Council’s Project Award and has been the recipient of an Artist in the Community Scheme Project Realisation Award (2012), an Arts Council Bursary (2008), Arts Council’s Artist in the Community Scheme Project Realisation Award (2008), Arts Council’s Artist in the Community Scheme Research and Development Grant (2006) and Breaking Ground Local Artist Commission (2005). Dr Alan Grossman Non-Fiction Screen Media Practice and the Digital Humanities: The Age of the 'Hedgefox' Dr Alan Grossman is Director of the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice (www.ctmp.ie) in the Dublin Institute of Technology. He is a non-executive director of Pivotal Arts, Dublin (http:// www.pivotalarts.org) responsible for research and development of documentary-led projects. He has a Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
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Digital Humanities Exploratorium: Pathways to Interdisciplinarity, Creative Praxis and Digital Humanities Research
longstanding visual ethnographic involvement with the cultural politics of identity, migration and diasporic formations across infra and transnational contexts; from the perspective of the minority Welsh-language resistance movement in Wales, to Kurdish refugee music in Scotland in the form of a performative documentary film, Silent Song (2000, UK, 15 mins), to his co-directed documentary film projects Here To Stay (2006, Ireland, 72 mins) and Promise and Unrest (2010, Philippines, 79 min), both funded by the Irish Film Board. He has published in numerous journals including Space and Culture, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, while participating in international conferences across the fields of media, cultural and migration studies, documentary film and visual anthropology. He is co-editor with Áine O’Brien of Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice (2007, Wallflower/Columbia University Press), a combined book/DVD-ROM engaged with questions of mobility and displacement through the analytical prism of creative practice.
20th June 2013
SESSION 4: Archaeology and Digital Technologies (9:30am-11:00am) Chair: Matthew Seaver Panel: Clíodhna Ní Lionáin, Eimear Meegan, Dr Steven Davis
Clíodhna Ní Lionáin Clíodhna Ní Lionáin is a PhD student and Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholar in the School of Archaeology at UCD. Her thesis looks at modern perceptions of prehistoric Irish-Iberian connections. As part of this, she is exploring how open-air rock art is presented and promoted in her study area (Ireland and NW Iberia). This has led her to setting up a rock art recording project in County Wicklow, which she will be carrying out over the next 18 months. This blog will follow the progress of that project, while also examining how we engage with prehistoric rock art, and archaeology in general, in the present. Eimear Meegan Eimear Meegan is a doctoral researcher in University College Dublin (UCD)’s School of Archaeology. Her current research, kindly supported by the UCD John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies, explores the role of choice as a driver of social change in prehistoric island societies, both within the Mediterranean Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
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Digital Humanities Exploratorium: Pathways to Interdisciplinarity, Creative Praxis and Digital Humanities Research
and elsewhere in Europe. She is particularly interested in the development of archaeological theory, the use of 3D modelling techniques within archaeology and the materiality of production in the prehistoric world. Dr Steven Davis Prospection plus: digital archaeology in the Br煤 na B贸inne World Heritage Site Stephen Davis is by training an environmental archaeologist and palaeoecologist with a background in analysis of pollen, testate amoebae and insect remains. Since 2010, he has become increasingly involved with digital methods, particularly within Br煤 na B贸inne, initially from the perspective of archaeological prospection through analysis of lidar (Airborne Laser Scanner) data and satellite imagery, but increasingly with a view to digital documentation and to landscape perspectives.
SESSION 5: Blogging, Apps, Gender and Maps (11:15am-12:45pm) Chair: Dr Marisa Ronan Panel: Karen Wade & Dr Derek Greene, Lisa Cassidy, Andy Flaherty and Tom Rowley (StoryMap)
Karen Wade Finding the Irish blogosphere: An interdisciplinary approach Karen Wade holds a BA in English and Linguistics and an MA in Gender and Writing, from UCD. Her research interests include new media, digital literature, gender studies and autobiography. Supervised by Professor Gerardine Meaney, her PhD project is currently titled Gender and the Irish Blogging Community, and examines how community and identity are constructed and performed in an explicitly Irish-identified online literary community. Areas of focus include the relevance of identity categories such as Irishness and gender to bloggers' self-figurations, the construction of legitimacy and prestige within blogging communities, and issues of authenticity, performativity and fictionalization pertaining to lifewriting in a digital context. Dr Derek Greene Dr Derek Greene is a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science and Informatics at UCD. He received his Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin in 2006, for work in the area of unsupervised text Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
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Digital Humanities Exploratorium: Pathways to Interdisciplinarity, Creative Praxis and Digital Humanities Research
mining. After working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Machine Learning Group in UCD, he joined the SFI-funded Clique Research Cluster as a Research Fellow in May 2009, based in the UCD CASL institute. His current research at Clique focuses on network analysis, social media monitoring, community finding, and social recommender systems. In addition to his work at UCD, Derek is also currently an Adjunct Lecturer at the NUIG College of Engineering & Informatics, and an External Examiner for the DIT School of Computing. Â http://derekgreene.com Lisa Cassidy Lisa Cassidy is a freelance architecture writer and researcher, and maintains an award-winning blog about elements of Dublin's built environment at www.builtdublin.com. Â Lisa recently completed a research Masters thesis at UCD School of Architecture. Andy Flaherty and Tom Rowley (StoryMap) Storymap is a fresh and original project that captures the personality of Dublin through its stories and storytellers. They find interesting stories about the city, film them being told in the relevant spot, and then upload and integrate the stories on an online map (www.storymap.ie). The stories range widely - from personal to historical, funny to tragic, drunken misadventure to romantic encounter - and all illuminate a different facet of Dublin life. The result is a website that gives a vision of Dublin by Dubliners, and highlights the remarkable stories that lie beneath every Dublin street across centuries, generations, and nationalities. They launched the website in February and have expanded steadily to 40 stories, with a new story each week. The project has received great feedback, with articles in the Irish Independent, Irish Times, and features on Newstalk with Tom Dunne & RTE. Storymap was conceived and is run by two young filmmakers - Andy Flaherty and Tom Rowley - who, without any funding or support, have brought the project forward with great energy and dedication.
Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
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Digital Humanities Exploratorium: Pathways to Interdisciplinarity, Creative Praxis and Digital Humanities Research
SESSION 6: Digitizing Irish Studies (1:45pm-2:45pm) Chair: Dr Graham Price Panel: Professor Margaret Kelleher, Mark Duncan
Professor Margaret Kelleher Building an Electronic Version of the Loebers' Guide to Irish Fiction Professor Margaret Kelleher is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at UCD, and took up that position in October 2012. For the previous five years she was founding director of An Foras Feasa: the Institute for Research in Irish Historical and Cultural Traditions, at NUI Maynooth. She has published widely in the areas of nineteenth-century literature, famine studies, and Irish women’s writings; and her current research project is a study of bilingual culture in nineteenth-century Ireland. In 2011 she was awarded an Irish Research Council Senior Project Fellowship to work with colleagues in An Foras Feasa to create an electronic version of the Loebers’ Guide to Irish Fiction (see http://www.lgif.ie). Forthcoming publications include articles in the Digital Humanities Quarterly, Irish Review, Oxford Bibliographies Online and Oxford Handbook of Irish History. Professor Kelleher is Chairperson of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures and a member of the newly formed international Humanities Committee for Science Europe. She is also board member of the Irish Film Institute and the Irish Theatre Institute. Mark Duncan (Century Ireland) Mark Duncan is a Director of Century Ireland and a founder of the InQuest Research Group. He is a former Director of the four-year GAA Oral History Project at Boston College and has acted as Head of Research for RTÉ News & Current Affairs on a broad array of political and state events. His books include The GAA: A People’s History (2009) (with Mike Cronin and Paul Rouse) and Handling Change: A History of the Irish Bank Officials Association (2012) (with Paul Rouse). Century Ireland is a digital newspaper and online resource for information and analysis on a critical period in modern Irish history. Commissioned by the Department of Arts, Heritage & Gaeltacht and based at Boston College-Ireland, it is a central plank in the Irish State’s plans to commemorate the Irish revolutionary decade, 1913-23. Century Ireland is hosted by RTE (www.rte.ie/centuryireland) and involves a partnership between all the major national cultural institutions and many of the leading educational institutions on the island of Ireland. Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
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Digital Humanities Exploratorium: Pathways to Interdisciplinarity, Creative Praxis and Digital Humanities Research
SESSION 7: Education, Creativity and Digital Practices (3:00pm-4:30pm) Chair: Dr Angela Rickard Panel: Kate Delaney, Professor Lizbeth Goodman, Lynne Heller
Kate Delaney Digital Media with at Risk Youth After completing an MA in Music Technology at Queens University, Kate began to move into the field of Digital Media in Education. Work began with the Digital Hub 10 years ago; developing courses around creative software for various groups of all ages including local communities in Dublin 8. Since then, Kate has worked with organisations from the Ombudsman for Children to the National Concert Hall. In 2010, Kate completed studies in Arts Participation and Development Education at Cork Institute of Technology and has since then focused on the facilitatory aspect of teaching. More recently, Kate has begun working closely with at-risk youth at Lourdes Youth & Community Services and on a collaborative project between the Ballymun Job Centre and the Probation Services. Professor Lizbeth Goodman Professor Lizbeth Goodman is Chair of Creative Technology Innovation and Professor of Education (Inclusive Design for Learning) at UCD, where she is an Executive of the Innovation Academy and Senior Advisor to the Leonardo Group of the Science Gallery. She is Founder/Director of the SMARTlab and the MAGIC (Multimedia and Games Innovation Centre). In 2012 she was nominated to Chair the Social Sciences Committee of the Royal Irish Academy. She has written and edited 13 books and many peer reviewed articles and has supervised over 30 PhDs to successful completion. Prior to joining UCD, Lizbeth served as Director of Research for Futurelab Education. She has co-developed several groundbreaking teaching and learning tools and kinaesthetic games which have been used in the foundation of several international charities for women and children at risk and have built a ‘backbone’ of early cybercafés and recent technology literacy projects for women worldwide. She won the Lifetime Achievement Award for Volunteer Service to Women and Children in 2003. Lizbeth is also an award-winning advocate of community-based ethical learning and teaching models using interactive tools and games to inspire and engage learners of all ages and abilities; and has just completed the pedagogic preparation of a new animated early learning television series due to air on Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
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Digital Humanities Exploratorium: Pathways to Interdisciplinarity, Creative Praxis and Digital Humanities Research
TG4 this year, with music by Kila. In 2008, she was awarded the Blackberry Rim industry top prizes for Best Woman in the Academic and Public Sectors, and Outstanding Woman in Technology. She is the founder of the emergent field of Creative Technology Innovation, and is currently working on a Roadmap for Responsible Innovation including a publication on Hippocratic Education and Innovation. Lynne Heller Mind the Gap Lynne Heller is a Canadian post-disciplinary artist and educator. Her interests encompass material culture, new media performative interaction, graphic novels and sculptural installation. Heller completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 and teaches at OCAD University, Toronto, Canada. She is currently undertaking a PhD, jointly at SMARTlab and the Graduate Research and Education Programme (GREP) in Gender, Culture and Identity at UCD. http://www.lynneheller.com Scott McCloud in his germinal book Understanding Comics suggests that the structure of comic panels with their attendant gutters, ‘fracture both time and space, offering a jagged staccato rhythm of unconnected moments’ (p.67) that the reader has to interpolate in order to create narrative and meaning. This theorization of the gutter is equally applicable to the action of ‘teleporting’ oneself within a virtual world. The sudden departure and consequent arrival into a radically different place, with literally dark space momentarily signalling the disjuncture, closely mirrors the function of the gutter in the comic book format. Out of this ability / encumbrance within the virtual comes a particular aesthetic and editing trope often used in machinima, the capture of sequential imaging from digital 3D animation. This presentation explores the similarities and differences between the two media and seeks to find overarching themes to theorize the implications of these artistic strategies, aesthetically and psychologically. Does the erratic quick cut encourage the reader / viewer to become a partner in the creation of meaning or does it further a superficial, truncated attention in a Twitter addicted culture?
Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
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Digital Humanities Exploratorium: Pathways to Interdisciplinarity, Creative Praxis and Digital Humanities Research
SESSION 8: Memory, History, Futurity Time: 4:45pm-6:30pm Chair: Dr. Emilie Pine Panel: David Cotter (Future Creators), Donal Fallon and Sam McGrath (Come Here to Me)
David Cotter (Future Creators) David Cotter, co-ordinator of The Future Creators programme, is a qualified artist & graphic designer with a postgraduate diploma in Art & Design Education from NCAD.
He has been teaching art at
primary, secondary and PLC levels, often in disadvantaged communities, for almost ten years. During his Dip year he found himself more and more drawn to teaching through digital media. David believes that computers provide a vital platform for teaching and learning, and for equipping young people with the essential skills they will need when entering the jobs market. The Future Creators is an after-school programme for 13 to 16 year olds, run by the Digital Hub Development Agency in partnership with The National College of Art and Design. The programme gives young people, from the Liberties area of Dublin, an opportunity to develop digital skills while exploring their creative potential. The Future Creators programme runs for two evening a week throughout the school year. http://www.thefuturecreators.com Donal Fallon (Come Here to Me!) Donal Fallon is one of the team behind the 'Come Here To Me' website and book. He teaches the class 'Hidden Dublin: From the Monto to Little Jerusalem' with the Adult Education Department of UCD. He works with Historical Insights, Dublin's longest running historical tour company. He is a graduate of NUI Maynooth and UCD (MA Modern Irish History) and his MA thesis on the 'Animal Gangs' of 1930s Dublin will be published by Irish Academic Press in August. Sam McGrath (Come Here to Me!) Sam is currently completing the Archives and Record Management Masters course in UCD. His thesis is focused on archives and Web 2.0, based on his digitisation, social media and crowdsourcing work with the Archive of the Irish in Britain. Completing his B.A. in History and Politics in UCD in 2011, he has contributed content to RTE’s ‘The History Show’ and was the author of a series of articles on 'UCD's
Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
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Digital Humanities Exploratorium: Pathways to Interdisciplinarity, Creative Praxis and Digital Humanities Research
Hidden History' for The College Tribune. His latest research interests for the Come Here To Me! blog include the history of ethnic restaurants in Dublin and the politics surrounding memorials to assassinated anti-Treaty IRA volunteers in the city. He has previously worked with the Irish Labour History Museum in Dublin, the People's History Museum in Manchester and the Digital Repository of Ireland in Maynooth. Come Here To Me! is a group blog that focuses on the life and culture of Dublin city. Music, history, football, politics and pub crawls all feature. Since November 2009, the three writers have published over 1,800 articles, received over a million hits, had over 5,900 comments and enjoy over 4,100 ‘likes’ on Facebook. . In December 2012, New Island published a collection of seventy of the best stories from the blog. Within weeks, the first print run sold out and the second print run is selling very well at the moment. The book received excellent reviews from The Sunday Times, the Irish Independent and the Dublin Review of Books. http://www.comeheretome.com
Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
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