Anniversary Essays - Forty Years of Geography at Maynooth. Volume 1 & 2

The following collection of ‘Anniversar y Essays’ is an odd mix. But yet, looking through it, I find its oddness perfectly appropriate, because isn’t geography – the discipline and the subject matter – precisely that? Space is, as many of these essays explicit ly or implicitly highlight, a crazy mixture of thrown together objects, forces and ideas. And it’s this fact of geography that gives me heart when I flick through the following essays and think of them as representing what scholars and researchers and teachers in Maynooth’s Department of Geography have done over the last four decades. Sure, we’ve done more than what this collection captures, and there’s no doubt we’ll continue to do amazing things, but at this juncture, in our 40 th year, I believe this collection is a wonderful transect through the department’s development and a unique testimony to its intellectual vibrancy. All along the transect, we are exposed to the wide variety of research questions addressed by geographers in Maynooth; questions about colonialism, health, climate, memory, place, migration, water, religion, identity, inward investment, and technology, and much more besides. An odd mix, yes, but a productive one, too. We also get to see developments and changes in the de partment as a place. In the first few chapters, for example, we see signs of the department’s early life as a centre for the study of Ireland’s historical geography, as well as a burgeoning location for the study of climate, medical and economic geography. Then, as the collection progresses, we discern a whole set of new issues tackled, including urban and technological change, adaptation to climate change, identity, planni ng, embodiment, and the politics and economics of Ireland’s changing circumstances. I think it fair to say that the collectio n also offers a unique opportunity to examine the breadth and richness of our discipline. The essays reflect many of the various ways of thinking about and doing geography. We see, for instance, that geography is about physical and social processes, about climate and class, say; and that geography is about using a range of methods, from remote sensing to ethnography. We also see examples of how scholars in the department ha ve engaged theoretically with the discipline by drawing from and seeking to contribute to what we know about physical geography, climate change studies, feminist theory, Marxism, post-structuralism, and the world of policy-makers. From their base in Maynooth, geographers in the Department have helped to develop broader understanding of key issues in the discipline, often by making significant key contributions to geographical knowledge. Long may that continue. The collection lying before you truly is a unique heritage document, which demonstrates what scholarship in one Irish academic department can achieve over a forty-year span. In this sense it has value. But I believe the collection has wider resonance. For students of the history and philosophy of science in general, and geography in particular, the collection is a landmark contribution. There is plenty of scope to imagine how it might be used to learn about the Irish geography community and how it has grown and changed in the last forty years. I also hope the collection might be used by under- and post-graduate students as an entry point into learning to understand this odd discipline, but also this fantastic department. For example, it is striking how, just as the last five years or so have seen huge changes in the department, we also see in the latter chapters of the collection a wide range of new patterns take shape, such as the internationalization of the department’s research foci and publishing venues; the expression of engaged scholarship regarding contemporary issues in Ireland and beyond; new publishing strategies, including the use of blogs; and new strengths in established areas of the department’s research activities such as climate change. There have been important developments in academic geography in the last few years, not just in Ireland; this sort of coll ection should help piece together explanations for what has happened and why. In sum, then, the collection effectively captures geography’s odd mix and some of Maynooth’s role in its creation. It is at once a celebration of Geography in Maynooth and an opportunity to glimpse the department’s richness, its diversity, and breadth. I hope you agree

Expanding Eco-Visualization: Sculpting Corn Production

This dissertation expands upon the definition of eco-visualization artwork. EV was originally defined in 2006 by Tiffany Holmes as a way to display the real time consumption statistics of key environmental resources for the goal of promoting ecological literacy. I assert that the final forms of EV artworks are not necessarily dependent on technology, and can differ in terms of media used, in that they can be sculptural, video-based, or static two-dimensional forms that communicate interpreted environmental information. There are two main categories of EV: one that is predominantly screen-based and another that employs a variety of modes of representation to visualize environmental information. EVs are political acts, situated in a charged climate of rising awareness, operating within the context of environmentalism and sustainability. I discuss a variety of EV works within the frame of ecopsychology, including EcoArtTech’s Eclipse and Keith Deverell’s Building Run; Andrea Polli’s Cloud Car and Particle Falls; Nathalie Miebach’s series, The Sandy Rides; and Natalie Jeremijenko’s Mussel Choir. The range of EV works provided models for my creative project, Sculpting Corn Production, and a foundation from which I developed a creative methodology. Working to defeat my experience of solastalgia, Sculpting Corn Production is a series of discrete paper sculptures focusing on American industrial corn farming. This EV also functions as a way for me to understand our devastated monoculture landscapes and the politics, economics, and related areas of ecology of our food production

Digital Media and Textuality: From Creation to Archiving

Due to computers' ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts are no longer exclusively comprised of static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital artifacts from obsolescence? And how can digital media be used or taught inside classrooms? These and other questions are addressed in this volume that assembles contributions by artists, writers, scholars and editors. They offer a multiperspectival view on the way digital media have changed our notion of textuality

Digital Media and Textuality

Due to computers' ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts are no longer exclusively comprised of static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital artifacts from obsolescence? And how can digital media be used or taught inside classrooms? These and other questions are addressed in this volume that assembles contributions by artists, writers, scholars and editors such as Dene Grigar, Sandy Baldwin, Carlos Reis, and Frieder Nake. They offer a multiperspectival view on the way digital media have changed our notion of textuality

Sight, sound, the chicken and the egg: Audio-visual co-dependency in music

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Amongst the modern day abundance of audio-visual media, where sounds represent everything from the swooping of virtual cameras through 3D spaces to the pressing of buttons and receiving of emails, and conversely where VJs routinely accompany live musical performance with an increasingly sophisticated language of abstract computer animation, the notion of music as a necessarily exclusively aural medium seems somewhat out of place. Psychological theories relating to the cognition of sound, in particular physical schema, accounting for the ubiquity of vertical plane pitch metaphors in most musical cultures, provide evidence of a deep-rooted spatially informed understanding of sound thus providing a common ground for both sound and vision in music. Furthermore, Western Classical composition is rife with examples of visually conceived forms from Bach’s Crab Canon (1747) to Xenakis’ architecturally inspired Metastasis (1954). However, in practice the gap between the listener’s auditory experience and the composer’s visual concept is often insurmountable. Rising to Schaeffer’s call for “Primacy to the ear!” (Schaeffer, 1967, pp. 28-30), acousmatic composers have sought to derive music exclusively from experientially verifiable criteria. However, in its pervasiveness of other musical genres, no doubt aided by technologically and commercially driven domination of the pre-recorded over the live listening experience in the latter half of the twentieth century, such an approach has lead to the neglect of visual aspects in the live performance of much art-music. This research aims to begin to redress this balance through the composition of, largely computer realised, audio-visual works whose conception arises not from a superimposition of one medium upon another, but through the very relations between the media themselves. Utilising modern computers’ ability to synchronise physical and virtual visual events with synthesised sound in real time not only affords composers an invaluable tool for enhancing listener’s perception of formal structures but also implies causal relationships between the sonic and the visual which can provide a base of intuitive understanding on which more complex formal ideas can be built.Sponsored by the Brunel University Isambard Scholarship

Digital Histories

Historical scholarship is currently undergoing a digital turn. All historians have experienced this change in one way or another, by writing on word processors, applying quantitative methods on digitalized source materials, or using internet resources and digital tools. Digital Histories showcases this emerging wave of digital history research. It presents work by historians who – on their own or through collaborations with e.g. information technology specialists – have uncovered new, empirical historical knowledge through digital and computational methods. The topics of the volume range from the medieval period to the present day, including various parts of Europe. The chapters apply an exemplary array of methods, such as digital metadata analysis, machine learning, network analysis, topic modelling, named entity recognition, collocation analysis, critical search, and text and data mining. The volume argues that digital history is entering a mature phase, digital history ‘in action’, where its focus is shifting from the building of resources towards the making of new historical knowledge. This also involves novel challenges that digital methods pose to historical research, including awareness of the pitfalls and limitations of the digital tools and the necessity of new forms of digital source criticisms. Through its combination of empirical, conceptual and contextual studies, Digital Histories is a timely and pioneering contribution taking stock of how digital research currently advances historical scholarship

Digital Media and Textuality

Due to computers' ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts are no longer exclusively comprised of static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital artifacts from obsolescence? And how can digital media be used or taught inside classrooms? These and other questions are addressed in this volume that assembles contributions by artists, writers, scholars and editors such as Dene Grigar, Sandy Baldwin, Carlos Reis, and Frieder Nake. They offer a multiperspectival view on the way digital media have changed our notion of textuality