UCD Humanities Institute Research Collection
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The Humanities Institute showcases UCD’s expertise and scholarship in the humanities to develop international distinction that enhances the vitality and richness of Ireland’s cultural and intellectual experience.
The institute aims to develop the critical mass and international visibility of interdisciplinary research in the humanities at UCD by acting as a laboratory for the study of culture and the human experience. It complements research undertaken within related UCD Schools and research institutes while concurrently providing a neutral space for the delivery of interdisciplinary or postdisciplinary research that transcends the intellectual boundaries of a particular subject or discipline. The HI will develop as a driving force for knowledge creation and transfer within UCD and in the context of the humanities and social sciences in Ireland and Europe.
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- PublicationBorders, Brexit and the Irish Academic CommunityIn the autumn of 1989 I was part of the worldwide television audience that watched the fall of the Berlin Wall with astonished incredulity. I had grown up in postwar West Germany with the conviction that the Berlin Wall, and the division of the country and of Europe, were the forever-cemented historical outcome of National Socialism and of the Second World War. The historic events of 1989 then taught me the lesson that history is contingent and unpredictable.
164 - PublicationBritish Military Recruitment in Ireland during the Crimean War, 1854-56Ireland has a diverse military historiography, principally within the confines of the British Army. Much has been written to date in relation to Ireland’s relationship with that service, particularly in recent years and with a focus upon the Great War. Yet significant gaps still remain in relation to the nineteenth century. By analysing the relationship between Irish society and the British Armed Forces, through the lens of recruitment, this article illustrates how and why the Crimean War years represent the positive pinnacle of Ireland’s relationship with the empire and the British Army and Royal Navy.
315 - PublicationConceptualizing ‘sense of place’ in cultural ecosystem services: A framework for interdisciplinary researchIn this paper we aim to establish a conceptual and practical framework for investigating sense of place as a category of cultural ecosystem services, drawing upon transdisciplinary research on assessing cultural value and ecosystem change in the Irish Sea. We examine sense of place as a material phenomenon, embedded in and expressive of the relationship between determining ecological conditions of particular locations and the determining social and cultural conditions of human habitation. Our emphasis on sense of place as a material phenomenon contrasts with the prevailing tendency in ecosystem services literature to treat cultural ecosystem services as ‘non-material’, ‘immaterial’, or ‘intangible’, and builds on a call to conceptualize cultural ecosystem services in ‘a more theoretically nuanced approach’ which yields practical means of researching and assessing cultural benefits (Fish et al., 2016a, p. 215). The paper emerges from a transdisciplinary project on ‘The Cultural Value of Coastlines’, which seeks to define a mechanism for integrating materialist research on cultural benefits into the ecosystem services framework. We demonstrate the need for a more significant role for sense of place as a category of cultural ecosystem services, and for research practices which can account for the material and socially-produced nature of sense of place.
567Scopus© Citations 59 - PublicationDiscovering Structure in Social Networks of 19th Century Fiction(ACM, 2016-05-25)
; ; ; ; ; Inspired by the increasing availability of large text corpora online, digital humanities scholars are adopting computational approaches to explore questions in the field of literature from new perspectives. In this paper, we examine detailed social networks of characters, extracted from several works of 19th century fiction by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. This allows us to apply methodologies from social network analysis, such as community detection, to explore the structure of these networks. By evaluating the results in collaboration with literary scholars, we find that the structure of the character networks can reveal underlying structural aspects within a novel, particularly in relation to plot and characterisation.592Scopus© Citations 10 - Publication
1538 - PublicationExploring the Role of Gender in 19th Century Fiction Through the Lens of Word Embeddings(2017-06-20)
; ; ; ; Within the last decade, substantial advances have been made in the field of computational linguistics, due in part to the evolution of word embedding algorithms inspired by neural network models. These algorithms attempt to derive a set of vectors which represent the vocabulary of a textual corpus in a new embedded space. This new representation can then be used to measure the underlying similarity between words. In this paper, we explore the role an author's gender may play in the selection of words that they choose to construct their narratives. Using a curated corpus of forty-eight 19th century novels, we generate, visualise, and investigate word embedding representations using a list of gender-encoded words. This allows us to explore the different ways in which male and female authors of this corpus use terms relating to contemporary understandings of gender and gender roles.1159 - PublicationHistory Gasps: Myth in Contemporary Irish Women's PoetryRecent years have seen a very rapid development in women's poetry in Ireland, a development which is part of a much wider one in women's writing and culture. The prevalence of poetry and the relative scarcity of prose in this movement is specific to Ireland and a significant departure from the pattern elsewhere. The strength of the tradition of women's fiction and the fragmentary nature of the tradition in poetry have tended to produce first an increasingly self-conscious feminist fiction, then an upsurge of women's poetry which attempts to re-define the poetic tradition and women's relation to it.
597 - PublicationIreland and the first media war: digestible, cultural engagements of the Crimean War 1854-6The Crimean War was the first ‘media war’: an international conflict experienced, not simply through the press and journals, but through a variety of ‘cultural dimensions’, including poems and ballads, and not after events had transpired but often during their occurrence. Yet its cultural historiography remains heavily Anglo- (and London-) centric, despite the war culturally impacting the entire United Kingdom. Within that Anglophonic Ireland’s popular or public response to the conflict was a mixture of martial and oftentimes imperial enthusiasm, and local or national interest, with a minority strain of criticism, opposition and nationalism. By providing fresh analysis of the same, this essay serves to both illustrate the ambiguous nature of Irish identity in the 1850s (in the wake of the Famine) – within the union and as part of the empire – and epitomise the often elusive, contradictory and paradoxical nature of the same, while also demonstrating the interest Irish people showed in the war; how that was outwardly manifest; and where that fits within the broader contexts of Ireland’s war memorialisation/commemoration tradition and the cultural impacts and legacies of war.
285 - Publication"The Languo of Flows": Ecosystem Services, Cultural Value, and the Nuclear Legacy in the Irish Sea(Duke University Press, 2019-11-01)
; ; ; “Flow” is a key concept in our era of liquid modernity, across a broad range of ecological, economic, and cultural discourses. In this essay, we examine the material flows integral to naturecultures through the specific case study of Seascale on the Cumbria coast in the UK. Through an analysis of cultural representations, we show the construction of Seascale as a seaside resort in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the rapid and irrevocable sinking of its cultural value since the commissioning of the nuclear power and reprocessing plant at Sellafield in 1947. By following the “flows” of pleasure, emotion, energy, and waste through Seascale, we explore the legacies of nuclear contamination for coastal communities, within a broader regime of the commodification of nature. This essay emerges from a transdisciplinary research project to investigate the cultural influences and impacts of ecosystem change in coastal environments around the Irish Sea. A collaboration between environmental humanities and ecological sciences, the project sought a materialist intervention in the conceptualization and practice of ecosystem assessment so as to capture and map a more inclusive and multidirectional sense of the flows that are integral to ecosystems, and to move beyond the limitations of dominant models of environmental stewardship. In contrast to the ways in which flow metaphors have been employed in contemporary economic and environmental discourse, the project attempts to analyze the material flows integral to naturecultures through particular places, perspectives, and agencies.120 - PublicationLegacies of a Broken United Kingdom: British Military Charities, the State and the Courts in Ireland, 1923–29Over the past forty years the historiography of the British Army ex-serviceman in Ireland has undergone a veritable ‘historical revolution’. Like its British and international counterparts, the historiography on Ireland has focussed on the lives and care of these men after the war within the Irish Free State, Irish government policy towards them, and ex-servicemen’s relationships with the Irish and British governments, British agencies and their own often hostile communities. Researchers continue to document the existence, organisation and activities of two British government agencies: the Land Trust and Ministry of Pensions, with brief analyses being undertaken on the British Legion and more especially the Southern Irish Loyalists Relief Association’s vital role in relieving impoverished ex-servicemen and their families. Yet far more can still be said about ‘British’ military charity in Ireland after 1922. The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, to discuss two court cases that were fought by the Irish, British and Northern Irish governments and several other Irish interests between 1923 and 1929 over the legacies of two then redundant pre-war Irish military charities. Second, to analyse the place of two court cases within the broader contexts of Irish post-war state-building and the history of the British ex-serviceman, but more especially his family in Ireland. What would their fate be in an independent Ireland?
433Scopus© Citations 2 - PublicationLong Day's Journey into Night: Modernism, Post-Modernism and Maternal LossLong Day's journey into Night may seem a strange starting place for a feminist analysis of modernism and post-modernism. Yet even the most conservative criticism reads this play as an enactment and embodiment of loss, specifically loss of the mother. That loss is rarely seen in the context of a more general "loss", a cultural loss of legitimacy and authenticity, endemic in and enabling modernism, articulated as "disinheritance" by an Other "coded as feminine."
7734 - PublicationModernist perambulations through time and space: From Enlightened walking to crawling, stalking, modelling and street-walkingAnalysing diverse modes of walking across a wide range of texts from the Enlightenment period and beyond, this article explores how the practice of walking was discovered by philosophers, educators and writers as a rich discursive trope that stood for competing notions of the morally good life. The discussion proceeds to then investigate how psychological, philosophical and moral interpretations of bad practices of walking in particular resurface in texts by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and the interwar writer Irmgard Keun. It is argued that literary modernism transformed walking from an Enlightenment trope signifying progress into the embodiment of moral and epistemological ambivalence. In this process walking becomes an expression of the disconcerting experience of modernity. The paper concludes with a discussion of walking as a gendered performance: while the male walkers in the modernists texts under discussion suffer from a bad gait that leads to ruination, the new figure of the flâneuse manages to engage in pleasurable walking by abandoning the Enlightenment legacy of the good gait.
297 - PublicationNavigating Literary Text with Word Embeddings and Semantic Lexicons(2018-06-05)
; ; ; Word embeddings represent a powerful tool for mining the vocabularies of literary and historical text. However, there is little research demonstrating appropriate strategies for representing text and setting parameters, when constructing embedding models within a digital humanities context. In this paper we examine the effects of these choices using a case study involving 18th and 19th century texts from the British Library. The study demonstrates the importance of examining implicit assumptions around default strategies, when using embeddings with literary texts and highlights the potential of quantitative analysis to inform critical analysis196