A consideration of copyright for a national repository of humanities and social science data

In 2011 the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) began work on the development of an interactive national Trusted Digital Repository for contemporary and historical social and cultural data. Copyright and intellectual property rights were identified as essential areas which the DRI, as a content holder and data publisher, needed to investigate in order to develop workflows, policy and the Repository infrastructure. We established a Copyright and IP Task Force (CIPT) in January 2013 to capture and identify IP challenges from our stakeholder community and the DRI’s demonstrator collections. This report outlines the legislative context in which the CIPT worked, and how the CIPT addressed copyright challenges through the development of policies and a robust framework of legal documentation for the Repository. We also provide a case study on Orphan Works, detailing the process undertaken by the Clarke Stained Glass Studios Collection, one of DRI’s demonstrator projects, in preparing their content for online publication in the Repository

New Media, Free Expression, and the Offences Against the State Acts

New media facilitates communication and creates a common, lived experience. It also carries the potential for great harm on an individual and societal scale. Posting integrates information and emotion, with study after study finding that fear and anger transfer most readily online. Isolation follows, with insular groups forming. The result is an increasing bifurcation of society. Scholars also write about rising levels of depression and suicide that stem from online dependence and replacing analogical experience with digital interaction, as well as escalating levels of anxiety that are rooted in the validation expectation of the ‘like’ function. These changes generate instability and contribute to a volatile social environment. Significant political risks also accompany this novel genre. Hostile actors can use social media platforms to deepen political schisms, to promote certain candidates, and, as demonstrated by the recent Cambridge Analytica debacle, to swing elections. Extremist groups and terrorist organisations can use online interactions to build sympathetic audiences and to recruit adherents. Since 1939, the Offences Against the State Act (OAS) has served as the primary vehicle for confronting political violence and challenges to state authority. How effective is it in light of new media? The challenges are legion. Terrorist recruitment is just the tip of the iceberg. Social networking sites allow for targeted and global fundraising, international direction and control, anonymous power structures, and access to expertise. These platforms create spaces within which extreme ideologies can prosper, targeting individuals likely to be sympathetic to the cause, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ad infinitum. They offer an alternative reality, subject to factual manipulation and direction—a problem exacerbated by the risk of so-called deep fakes: autonomously-generated content that makes it appear that people acted, or that certain circumstances occurred, which never did. In November 2019 the Irish Government adopted a new regulation targeting social media. The measure focuses on political advertising and to ensure that voters have access to accurate information. It does not address the myriad further risks. This chapter, accordingly, focuses on ways in which the Offences Against the State Act (OAS) and related laws have historically treated free expression as a prelude to understanding how and whether the existing provisions are adequate for challenges from new media

Milwaukee’s Early Irish and the Role of the Church in Diasporic Urban American Settlement and Assimilation, 1890-1922

Anthropologists recognize social institutions, such as families, schools, marketplaces, and churches, to be integral to the survival of urban immigrant diasporas. Scholars such as Harold Mytum (1994), Michael Parker Pearson (1982), and Jörn Staecker (2000) view churchyard archaeology and the demographics of parishes as important tools in the study of historic corporate cultures and historic, transnational diasporas. This study addresses the corporate nature of foreign-born Irish immigrants arriving in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the last decade of the nineteenth century (c.1890-1900). The homogeneity of residential patterning associated with this Irish diaspora was tested by analyzing the parish records of Saint Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church. The findings of this research project (t(194)=1.49, p \u3c 0.05) identified a diminished degree of residential variance in the parish community until 1922 when the neighborhoods surrounding the church became residentially pluralized. The results of this study indicate that similar analyses in other ethnic communities both in Milwaukee and elsewhere could lead to a better understanding of the forces operating both for and against assimilation in early immigrant urban communities in the United States. It also suggests that the Celtic identity of the Irish in America was integrally linked to their communal organizations in important ways

Digital Archives and the Irish Commemorative Impulse: Gender, Identity, and Digital Cultural Heritage

The current ‘Decade of Centenaries’ (2012-2023) in the Republic of Ireland has created a pretext for funding high-profile national digitisation projects. During this decade, digital archives have become part of the public experience of commemoration in a way they were not before. Social media also emerged as a prominent mode of communicating the commemorations online, leaving behind an historical record of engagement. Releases of state digital archives have been aligned with key anniversaries, notably in 2016, and has set a precedent for digitisation as a new ritual of commemoration in this late-modern remembrance culture. Online engagement built towards and spiked between March and April 2016, and though it is a burgeoning area of interest in digital history and memory studies Twitter as a source for the systematic study of contemporary commemoration in Ireland has been little explored. In this context, this thesis demonstrates how the profusion of digital archives and online engagement with heritage emphasises the digital space as a territory for the performance of remembrance culture, underpinned by a critical heritage and feminist discourse. Taking three centennial collections as case studies, it demonstrates how ‘digitisations may be recognized as vibrant and historically situated sources in their own right’ even as they instantiate Irish cultural and collective memory and identity. Using digital humanities methods, it further substantiates the ways in which Twitter was (re)appropriated for the commemorations for feminist ends. Commemorating the 1916 Easter Rising continues to be a powerful reference point in defining and redefining Irish cultural identity. This thesis shows how both digital commemorative archives and Twitter have been mobilized in articulating national identity during this decade of commemorations, as well as in critical remembrance around the centenary of the Easter Rising, challenging inequality and authorised commemoration

Struggling to Remember: Perceptions, Potentials and Power in an Age of Mediatised Memory

What role do new, networked and pervasive technologies play in changing individual and collective memory processes? Many recent debates have focused on whether we are in the online era remembering ‘less’ or ‘more’ – informed, perhaps, by a tendency to think of memory spatially and quantifiably as working like an archive. Drawing on the philosophical theorising of Henri Bergson and its development through Gilbert Simondon, this thesis makes two interventions into the field. Firstly, conceptually, it establishes a process-based approach to perception, memory and consciousness in a shift away from the archive metaphor – thinking memory not as informing ‘knowledge of the past’ but ‘action in duration’. It situates the conscious, living being as transindividual – affectively relational to its perceived bodily and social environments, through psychic and collective individuation respectively. Moreover, it considers technologies as forms of transindividual extension of consciousness. Furthermore, it proposes the ‘antimetaphor’ of the anarchive as a conceptual tool with which to understand these durationbased, bodily and technological, action-oriented processes. Secondly, methodologically, it advocates a rephrasing of the question from how much we are remembering to how we are remembering differently. Armed now with a developed theoretical position and methodological approach, the thesis explores through three case-study chapters how personal and more historical pasts may be remembered, individually and more collectively, through new, prevalent technologies of memory such as search engines, forums and social-media sites. Analysing the material experiences of remembering, as well as examining the economic drives of the platforms and wider actors, and the resulting socio-political implications, the thesis sets out the original argument of a contemporary struggle for memory: a complex negotiation of tensions between agencies of the body, the social, and the multifarious and interconnected socio-political and economic interests of the technological platforms and hybridised media systems through which contemporary remembering increasingly takes place

Sex in the city: the rise of soft-erotic film culture in Cinema Leopold, Ghent, 1945-1954

Since the 1990s, film studies saw a disciplinary shift from approaches favoring a textual and ideological analysis of films to a broader understanding of the socio-cultural history of cinema under the banner of new cinema history. This turn not only allowed for ‘niche’ research domains to flourish such as film economics or cinema memory research, or for new empirical and critical methodologies to be applied to film and cinema history. This change in researching and writing film/cinema history also shed light on previously marginalized, neglected or uncharted film cultures and histories, burgeoning scholarship in for instance (s)exploitation cinema. This contribution examines a peculiar part of post-war local film culture in the Belgian city of Ghent, more precisely the one around the city-center soft-erotic cinema Cinema Leopold (1945-54). The research is based on a programming and box-office database compiled from archival sources and contextualized by other data (internal and external correspondence, posters,…) coming from the business archive of Octave Bonnevalle, Cinema Leopold’s founding pater familias (material kept in the State Archives of Belgium; RAB/B70/1928-1977). The database now contains information on 625 film titles shown between 1945 and 1954, out of which 233 were unidentified (due to lack of information). Although the database is at times crippled by source inconsistencies, it is extremely rich in documenting the everyday practices of a cinema that gradually turned into a soft-erotic movie theater. The database allows for some remarkable findings concerning shifts in the origin of films, their production years, genres, censorship and popularity. The key finding is that Cinema Leopold started out after the Second World War with a child-friendly, mainstream Hollywood-oriented film program, as did most cinemas in Ghent, but its profile slowly tilted towards more mature audiences and provocative film genres. These included French ‘risqué’ feature films containing some forms of nudity like Perfectionist/Un Grand Patron (Ciampi, 1951) and documentaries on venereal diseases like the successful Austrian Creeping Poison/Schleichendes Gift (Wallbrück, 1946), but also auteur movies such as Bergman’s Port of Call/Hamnstad (1948) were shown. It is interesting how Leopold walked a fine line between innovative, bold European art-house cinema, soft-erotic ‘didactic’ movies and flat-out commercial soft-porn. By 1954, Leopold had gathered a loyal crowd, which kept the cinema alive until 1981 despite the several law suits and trials. This micro-history offers a remarkable example of the post-war flourishing of alternative, yet profit-driven cinema circuits, riddled with media controversies and censorship