“1916 Degrees of Separation” –
network analysis by Dr Pádraig MacCarron
Friday, February 16 at 9:30 AM – 11:45 AM
UCD Humanities Institute , Dublin, Ireland
As part of the symposium “Digital Cultures, Big Data and Society”, Dr Pádraig MacCarron will speak about his recent research on the letters collected by the Letters 1916-1923 Project:
The Letters of 1916 project is one of the largest crowd-sourced letter archives in the world. Currently there are over 4,000 letters documenting a plethora of topics covering the Great War, to the Easter Rising to ordinary daily life. In this paper, we analyse the network of senders and recipients in this dataset. Using modern quantitative methodologies to examine this data will hopefully provide new insights into the Irish revolutionary leaders’ connections and assess the extent of their supportive networks.
The symposium is hosted by University College Dublin and “focuses on questions of close and distant reading and the critical functions of digital tools in the humanities.”
For a full schedule and registration details, please visit https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/digital-cultures-big-data-and-society-tickets-42079743646.
“The lives of letters” –
challenges of ethics and interpretation
Friday, February 16 at 9:30 AM – 3 PM
Conference Room, Graduate School, Ellen Wilkinson Building, Manchester University, UK
At an interdisciplinary workshop hosted by Manchester University, Monika Barget will talk about the “ethics of education” in the Letters 1916-1923 project and in public humanities projects in general:
In the face of criticism by some professional historians and history teachers that public humanities projects do not meet established criteria of ‘aperspectival objectivity’ (Luc Boltanski), this presentation explains how the Letters 1916-1923 three project empowers its users and volunteers to reflect upon the source material as well as the complex cultural process of ‘creating history’. Contemporary media criticism can be reconciled with theories of emotional learning and active humanitarianism, making public humanities projects a cornerstone of 21st-century historiography.
Please contact the organizers to register for the workshop: livesofletters.wordpress.com