Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Typ.Ologies: Reframing Ireland's Vernacular Letterform Through The Lens Of Heritage, Deirdre Maher Ring

Articles

Since the late 1800s, vernacular letterforms have been vital components of the traditional shopfronts of Ireland, enlivening, place-making, and inspiring dialogue with streetscapes. The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage identifies, records, and evaluates Ireland’s post-1700 architectural heritage. While the state initiative appraises architecturally significant shopfronts, it typically overlooks the critical signage element. This research aims to bridge this gap by documenting, mapping, and interpreting the existing vernacular letterforms in Kilkenny as a paradigm. Through the lens of heritage, the study seeks to construct a case for preserving, promoting, and advocating for vernacular letterforms and the traditional craft of signwriting. Signwriting …

The Quest For Influence: Examining Russia's Public Diplomacy Mechanisms In Africa, Isaac Antwi-Boasiako

Articles

This article examines Russian public diplomacy mechanisms in Africa. These include the intentional use of historical ties, various aid programmes in education and health, the targeted use of international broadcasting and digital media, and the exploitation of anti-Western sentiments on the continent. Russia employs these to win the hearts and minds of African publics for its national interest. The article first explores Moscow’s public diplomacy in general and analyses the challenges Russia faces in Africa, which has become a ‘dumping ground’ for public diplomacy campaigns by the US, the EU and its members, the UK, and China. The article argues …

“Be A Pattern For The World”: The Development Of A Dark Patterns Detection Tool To Prevent Online User Loss, Jordan Donnelly, Alan Downley, Yunpeng Liu, Yufei Su, Quanwei Sun, Lan Zeng, Andrea Curley, Damian Gordon, Paul Kelly, Dympna O'Sullivan, Anna Becevel

Articles

Dark Patterns are designed to trick users into sharing more information or spending more money than they had intended to do, by configuring online interactions to confuse or add pressure to the users. They are highly varied in their form, and are therefore difficult to classify and detect. Therefore, this research is designed to develop a framework for the automated detection of potential instances of web-based dark patterns, and from there to develop a software tool that will provide a highly useful defensive tool that helps detect and highlight these patterns.

Reissue & Revivalism: Uncovering Ireland's Lost Diy, Electronic And Post-Punk Histories, Neil O'Connor

Irish Communication Review

Reissues: a rediscovery of the past. This process of rediscovery is nowhere more evident than in the current output of the Dublin record label and shop, All City Records. Recently, its owner Olan O’Brien, has been delving into the unknown with a series of reintroduced gems from Ireland’s musical past with its AllChival imprint. Whether it is Quare Grooves, a compilation of Irish-made Seventies groove and funk or the re-release of Dublin producer Stano’s debut album of experimentalist new wave from 1983, the label has been playing a rival role in the recontextualising lost DIY (Do-it-Yourself), electronic and post …

Early Sound Systems Of The Irish Dance Bands And Showbands, Niall Coghlan

Irish Communication Review

This paper examines the culture and technologies around the sound systems used by the Irish dance and show bands of the 1950s and 1960s. With limited financial and technical resources available to the average musician of the period, many performers were forced to adopt a DIY approach, adapting or building their own instruments and sound equipment to meet changing tastes and needs. Literary sources are augmented by material drawn from interviews with two musicians who played with the showbands. The evolution of the technologies from the post-war period is documented and a self-sufficient, DIY approach is evidenced, prior to the …

Clubbing Criminals: The Hirschfeld Centre And The Emergence Of Queer Club Culture In Dublin, Ann-Marie Hanlon

Irish Communication Review

Ireland in the 1970s and 80s was an extremely hostile place for the LGBT community: male homosexuality remained a criminal offence and social, legal and political oppression was the norm. This article documents the emergence of a nascent queer clubbing scene in Dublin in this period and investigates the historical intersection of partying and politics in a DIY translocal music scene defined by the sexual politics of the time. In particular, this research focuses on exploring the social and political importance of Ireland’s first purpose built queer club, Flikkers, which opened in the Hirschfeld Centre, Temple Bar on St. Patrick’s …

Diy Connections And Collaborations: Mid-West To North-East, Ciarán Ryan

Irish Communication Review

Alternative music cultures can be found in various Irish cities and towns outside of the capital Dublin. These scenes may retain their own local idiosyncrasies, but those subscribing to do-it-yourself (DIY) ideals in Ireland are clearly influenced by sounds and styles from further afield. As punk mutated into different forms from the 1980s onwards, political and musical cues came from the countries to the East and West of Ireland - hardcore (Fairchild, 1995) from the United States, and anarcho-punk (Dines, 2004) from Britain. The DIY aesthetics of the early punk movements have since translated to numerous music genres and practices …

The Development Potential For Local Communities Of Religious Tourists Visiting Sacred Graves, Mohammad Taufiq Rahman, Rully Khairul Anwar

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This study aims to analyse the impact of religious tourists’ visits to tombs of saints. It illustrates the effect of these visits on the economic development of the surrounding community. This is qualitative research with a sociological approach used to determine the public acceptance of religious tourism to sacred places such as the Tomb of the Islamic Saints in Tasikmalaya, West Java, Indonesia. The results show that the community has made economic use of tourists that perform pilgrimages to fulfil their psychological needs, such as peace, tranquillity, and a sense of security. Furthermore, local governments’ development of religious tourism makes …

An Ethical Discussion About The Responsibility For Protection Of Minors In The Digital Environment: A State-Of-The-Art Review, Charles Alves De Castro, Aiden Carthy, Isobel Oreilly Dr

Articles

Many ethical questions have been raised regarding the use of social media and the internet, mainly related to the protection of young people in the digital environment. In order to critically address the research question "who is responsible for ethically protecting minors in the digital environment?", this paper will review the main literature available to understand the role of parents, the government, and companies in protecting young people within the digital environment. We employed a holistic process that covers a state-of-the-art review and desk research. The article is divided into four sessions; (1) Government Policies from the European Union (EU) …

Ghana's Public Diplomacy Under Kwame Nkrumah, Isaac Antwi-Boasiako

Conference Papers

The concept of public diplomacy is one of the trending approaches in modern international relations and diplomacy. Communicating and engaging effectively with the foreign public in a particular nation by a government to achieve its foreign policy objective is every government’s goal. The field of public diplomacy as an academic discipline in Ghana in particular and Africa has not received much attention compared to the Western World. This article attempts to bridge this gap by opening Ghana’s public diplomacy to academic scrutiny that has, as yet, been underdeveloped. This paper’s principal objective is to bring to light the public diplomacy …

Posters, Handkerchiefs And Murals: Visual Gender Separation During The Troubles, Bradley Rohlf

Irish Communication Review

The Troubles in Northern Ireland provide a complex and intriguing topic for many scholars in various academic disciplines. Their violence, publicity and tragedy are common themes that elicit a plethora of emotional responses throughout the world. However, the very intimate nature of this conflict creates a much more complex system of friends, foes and experiences for those involved. While the very heart of the Irish nationalist movement is founded on liberal and progressive concepts such as socialism and equality, the media associated with it sometimes promote tradition and conservatism, especially regarding gender. This critical study examines a sociopolitical struggle through …

Music Magazines And Gendered Space: The Representation Of Artists On The Covers Of Hot Press And Rolling Stone, Yvonne Kiely

Irish Communication Review

Over the past two decades the commercial music magazine industry has lapsed into a deepening cycle of continuous decline. The demise of the widely popular UK pop music magazine, Smash Hits, in 2006 and the announcement of the final print issue of NME in 2018 has been accompanied by music magazines worldwide reporting year-on-year declines in sales and readership. Meanwhile research has found that portrayals of gender on music magazine covers are largely unrepresentative and unreflective of social heterogeneity – yet the gendered media histories of the industry’s enduring and iconic music magazines remain largely under researched. In order …

The Crisis Of Communication In The Information Age: Revisiting C.P. Snow's Two Cultures In The Era Of Fake News, Aaron Green

Irish Communication Review

The purpose of this paper is to revisit C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture in light of the cultural dominance of information technology. The crisis of communication in the information age, whether in fake news, political polarisation or science denial, has come about because both scientific and literary cultures, in seeking a world without entropy, have inadvertently stumbled upon a world without meaning. In order to explain how this has happened, the paper first explores Snow's challenge: to describe the second law of thermodynamics. The paper then provides a description of entropy that is neutral with regard to thermodynamics and information, …

Along The Tevere: A Gastro-Historic Portrait Of The Region, Anke Klitzing

Articles

In June 2009, a group of masters students from the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy spent nine days visiting the lands of the Tevere river, travelling from its springs on Monte Fumaiolo in Emilia-Romagna to Rome by way of Umbria and the Lake Trasimeno. This article is a gastro-historic portrait of the lands of the Tevere, linking contemporary social, cultural and economic activities around food and tourism to the rich and long history of the region and highlighting persistent patterns, continuity and change.

The Still Center As Invented Topos: Static Pilgrimage In Aristasia, Race Mochridhe

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

After decades of challenges to many other definitional elements of ‘pilgrimage’, the centrality of motion and physical movement, whether literally enacted or realized virtually or through metaphor, remains largely uncontested. This paper examines practices of creative writing and home decorating among participants in the 1990s British subculture of ‘Aristasia’ (an outgrowth of a New Religious Movement known in the 1970s and 80s as ‘Madrianism’ but now more commonly referred to as ‘Filianism’) to argue that these practices functioned together for participants as static pilgrimages, accomplishing the same psychological and social tasks as traditional modes while suppressing even metaphorical concepts of …

Report On The Oxford Symposium On Food And Cookery 2018, Anke Klitzing

Reports

The annual Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery brings together food scholars from different disciplines, but predominantly in history and humanities. However, while continuing its tradition of more than 30 years in food studies, this international gathering also looks to the future, with several activities in the realm of Digital Humanities linked to the conference and its participants.

Memories Of Television In Ireland: Separating Media History From Nation State, Edward Brennan

Articles

This article emerges from a broader project that explores the history of television in Ireland using audience life story interviews. It argues that a dominant narrative persists in the history of television in the Republic of Ireland. Based in institutional sources this narrative is ideologically narrow although it tells a story of cultural liberation. A key example of its ideological limitation lies in the way that Irish people’s experience of British television transmissions has been forgotten. The reason for this lies in historical methods rather than conscious bias. Nevertheless, historical methods themselves can promote limited visons of reality that promote …

The Evolution Of An Enduring Expertise: Understanding Irish Economists In Irish Public Discourse In The Great Recession, Joe Fitzgerald, Brendan O'Rourke

Other

This work focuses on the institutional and social contexts of Irish economists’ prominence in public discourse in Ireland during the Great Recession. While examining performative aspects of experts’ legitimacy is important, understanding the wider societal context of how particular professional expertise is recognised is also vital (Collins & Evans 2007). The economics profession generally is characterised by strong hierarchy and dense integration (Fourcade, 2009; Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009; Pautz, 2014), we explore such phenomena in the Irish context. The Irish context is of interest more generally as a prominent PIIGS country in the Eurozone crisis, as a small peripheral state …

Television In Ireland Before Irish Television: 1950s Audiences And British Programming, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

The first television broadcasts in Ireland were watched in the 1950s. These initial programmes were British. This history of these early viewers, however, has been ignored. A dominant narrative has addressed the history of television in Ireland as the history of the public broadcaster Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ). Thus, the history of Irish television often begins in 1961, overlooking Irish people’s experience of the medium in the preceding decade. This paper breaks with traditional historiography by employing life history interviews to explore the uses, rituals and feelings attached to television in the years before RTÉ.

Irish people who watched television …

The Role And Usage Of Apps And Instant Messaging In Religious Mass Events, Juan Narbona, Daniel Arasa

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Over the last few years, large events have conferred great importance on Event Management, or the management of mass meetings. In the religious sector, for centuries, pilgrimages have been a clear example of mass events of a spiritual nature. Due to globalization and increased mobility, recent times have seen the multiplication of international events without a fixed location: Taizé encounters, Kumbh Mela (India), and World Youth Day are all good examples of this. These events imply at least a threefold spiritual, organizational and touristic challenge, and success in each one of these areas contributes to the favourable result of the …

Television In Ireland: A History From The Mediated Centre, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

This paper identifies and critiques a dominant narrative in the history of Irish television, which is too often passed off for, or accepted as, the history of television in Ireland. The his- tory of television in Ireland has been written within an institutional framework and depends on the cultural binary of tradition and modernity, ‘old Ireland’ and ‘new Ireland’. This dom- inant narrative fails to interrogate television as a medium. It provides an account of the Irish broadcaster RTÉ rather than an account of the arrival of a new medium. Ironically this nar- rative which hinges on the role of …

Why Does Film And Television Sci-Fi Tend To Portray Machines As Being Human?, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

This paper identifies, and attempts to explain, a lack of diversity in the way that cinema and television science fiction represents robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Through a qualitative content analysis of recent film and television portrayals, it is argued, that a limited and limiting vision predominates. This limitation may serve to ideologically reinforce the power of corporate elites. It may also hamper discussion and debate around technological possibilities and their relationship with society.

There has been a slew of entertainment productions since 2013 that represent AI and robotics. This work examines Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Interstellar (2014), Chappie (2015), …

The Production Of Ek Tha Tiger: A Marriage Of Convenience Between Bollywood And The Irish Film And Tourist Industries, Giovanna Rampazzo

Articles

This article examines a collaboration between the Irish and Hindi film industries, adopting the production of Kabir Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger (2012) in Dublin as a case study. It critically narrates the arc of the film’s production, foregrounding the intersecting concerns of Yash Raj Films and Irish creative and cultural institutions. Ek Tha Tiger represents Ireland through constructed idyllic images which proved to be successful in attracting tourists. Tracing the links between the production of the film and the promotion of tourism to Ireland, this article explains how the film was used to construct a ‘tourist gaze’ for audiences in …

Techno-Apocalypse: Technology, Religion, And Ideology In Bryan Singer’S H+, Edward Brennan

Books/Book chapters

This essay critically analyses the digital series H+. In the near future, adults who can afford them, have replaced tablets and cell phones with nanotechnology implants. The H+ implant acts as a medical diagnostic and can overlay the user's senses with a computer interface. The apocalypse comes in the form of a computer virus which infects the H+ network and instantly kills one third of humanity. The series represents the anxiety and religiosity that surrounds the possible social consequences of digital technology. It also explores the tensions and intersections between technology and faith. This essay makes the case, however, that …

Providing Objective Metrics Of Team Communication Skills Via Interpersonal Coordination Mechanisms, Celine De Looze, Brian Vaughan, Finnian Kelly, Alison Kay

Conference Papers

Being able to communicate efficiently has been acknowledged as a vital skill in many different domains. In particular, team communication skills are of key importance in the operation of complex machinery such as aircrafts, maritime vessels and such other, highly-specialized, civilian or military vehicles, as well as the performance of complex tasks in the medical domain. In this paper, we propose to use prosodic accommodation and turn- taking organisation to provide objective metrics of communica- tion skills. To do this, human-factors evaluations, via a coordi- nation Demand Analysis (CDA), were used in conjunction with a dynamic model of prosodic accommodation …

Tv Still Failing To Reflect Our Multicultural Society, Ian Kilroy

Articles

Irish television and media in 2015 still lacks diversity and does not reflect our multicultural society. An Op-Ed (opinion piece) in the Irish Times by a Dublin-based academic and lecturer in Technological University Dublin.

The Western Way: Democracy And The Media Assistance Model, Daire Higgins

Articles

International media assistance took off during a time where the ideological extremes of USA vs. USSR were set to disappear. Following the Cold War, international relations focused on democracy building, and nurturing independent media was embraced as a key part of this strategy. Fukayama called it the ‘End of History’, the fact that all other ideologies had fallen and Western style democracy was set to become the one common ideology. The US and UK led the way in media assistance, with their liberal ideas of a free press, bolstered by free market capitalism. America was the superpower, and forged the …

Rationalizing Creativity—Rationalizing Public Service: Is Scheduling Management Fit For The Digital Era?, Ann-Marie Murray

Articles

In public broadcast organizations across Europe, scheduling has been transformed from a marginal, administrative activity to a highly strategic management tool (Hellman, 1999; Hujanen, 2002; Meier, 2003;Ytreberg, 2000) Ellis (2000)described it as “the locus of power in television,” organizing production and managing budgets (p. 26). The role of scheduling in public broadcast organizations today reflects the demands of increasing competition and political pressure for efficiency and accountability. However, new challenges have emerged in the transition from public service broadcasting to public service media (PSM). PSM providers must redefine their mission for the digital era and find …

Bullying In A New Ground: Cyberbullying Among 9-16 Year Olds In Ireland, Thuy Dinh, Brian O'Neill

Articles

This paper builds on the data collected in Ireland by the cross-national EU Kids Online II project- a large 25 country survey which investigated children’s experiences of the internet, focusing on issues of use, activities, risks, and safetyi . This article explores incidences, forms and consequences of cyberbullying among Irish children, as well as discussing possible prevention and intervention strategies.

Sheridan's Promising Tale Is Half Told, Ian Kilroy

Articles

Review of 'Break a Leg', the memoir by Irish theatre artist Peter Sheridan. First published in the Sunday Business Post Magazine.