Unlocking the Archive
An introduction to the Beyond 2022 project by Dr Peter Crooks, Programme Director of Beyond 2022, Trinity College Dublin, Professor Guy Beiner, Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies at Boston College, and Orlaith McBride, Director of the National Archives of Ireland.
Listening to this discussion during the dark days of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was also struck by the force of Ireland’s capacity to move forwards from loss to recovery, something that gave this event a genuine emotional pull.
The extraordinary ‘Beyond 2022’ project will provide a virtual reconstruction of the record treasury lost in the fire that destroyed the Four Courts almost a century ago, during the Civil War. Many of us have watched the progress of the project team, led by Trinity historian Dr Peter Crooks, as they piece together lost narratives of Irish daily life from the fragments of assorted calendars, documents and files that survived the blaze. The charred remains are almost beautiful - works of a strange, fire-stormed art -- and the painstaking task of restoring them showcases the interdisciplinary magic that happens when archivists, computer scientists, conservationists, historians and imaginative funding bodies come together for a common purpose. In his opening remarks Peter talks about this project as ‘democratising access to a lost national memory’, a phrase that could stand as a motto for all the similar projects around the world that share the incentives of ‘Beyond 2022’, and an idea perfectly amplified in the panel contributions from Orlaith McBride and Guy Beiner. Listening to this discussion during the dark days of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was also struck by the force of Ireland’s capacity to move forwards from loss to recovery, something that gave this event a genuine emotional pull.
Beyond 2022 is Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury and a flagship project for Ireland's Decade of Commemorations.
TLRHub · Unlocking the Archives 2: Next Generation Access
Annual Edmund Burke Lecture, 2018
‘He Who Did Nothing: the poet as citizen’
Paul Muldoon, poet
The ever-resourceful Muldoon skips from language to landscape, Ireland to Boston, 1774 to the present day...
Paul Muldoon is perhaps Ireland’s most idiosyncratic poet and this was an idiosyncratic event, but an immensely enjoyable occasion that pushed at the boundaries of what we usually understand to be a ‘lecture’. The ever-resourceful Muldoon skips from language to landscape, Ireland to Boston, 1774 to the present day and Frederick Douglass to Van Morrison, teasing the audience with all kinds of possible connections on the horizon. When he comes to land at last it is to speak directly and movingly to the theme of human resistance. Drawing nuanced Irish parallels with North American history, he seeks out the enduring initiatives towards civil society that have driven forward the positive energies of both nations, gesturing backwards to Edmund Burke but also sideways to the critical decline of liberalism in the USA. And all of this is then eloquently tied up in the quiet political optimism of the closing lines to Muldoon’s long narrative poem, ‘With Joseph Brant in Canajoharie’:
‘The river still comes in at a rampage, still goes out as a runnel.
It persuades me that our native land
may seem to be filled to the brim –
may seem indeed, to have reached an almost total impasse--
yet retain the capacity for its own renewal.’
Trinity Long Room Hub's Annual Edmund Burke Lecture is delivered by a leading public intellectual of our time on a topic that engages with the challenges facing us today. Supported by a generous endowment in honour of Padraic Fallon by his family.
TLRHub · Annual Edmund Burke Lecture 2018 - Paul Muldoon
Art and Science Reading Group
On a Higher Plane, Mathematics + Art
Amelia McConville (School of English and Institute of Neuroscience), Autumn Brown (School of Education and Science Gallery Dublin), and Dr Claire Moriarty (Department of Philosophy)
The discussion...sparkles with insightful questions about where, and how, the worlds of art, design, philosophy and geometry collide...
Sometimes in the Hub the smaller events prove to be the most exciting, and this is certainly the case with the rich discussions led by the recently formed Art + Science Reading Group. This pioneering collaboration between some of the Hub’s Early Career Researchers and Trinity’s Science Gallery brings together experiences and ideas from those two far-spread wings – art and science – to shed light on our interpretations of the world. The sessions have all been riveting but the one that captured my heart was Dr Claire Moriarty’s presentation on the nineteenth-century Irish mathematician Oliver Byrne, a Trinity student whose unusual CV combined incendiarism, street-fighting and updating Euclid. Like his old adversary Berkeley, Byrne looked for the universe in the complex figures of infinitesimal calculus. The discussion, brilliantly curated by neurohumanities scholar Amelia McConville and the Science Gallery’s Education Fellow, Autumn Brown, sparkles with insightful questions about where, and how, the worlds of art, design, philosophy and geometry collide.
The Art + Science Reading Group is a virtual gathering of thinkers, researchers and the incurably curious. Organised by PhD candidates Amelia McConville (School of English and Institute of Neuroscience) and Autumn Brown (School of Education and Science Gallery Dublin) and supported by Science Gallery Dublin and the Trinity Long Room Hub.
TLRHub · TLRH | Art + Science Reading Group | On a Higher Plane: Mathematics + Art
About Professor Eve Patten: Eve Patten is a Professor in the School of English and a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. She is the Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub. Professor Patten has served as Head of School, Director of the Oscar Wilde Centre and Co-ordinator of the MPhil Irish Writing, Deputy-Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub and Global Director for the School of English. She lectures in nineteenth and twentieth-century British and Irish literature and is the author and editor of several books and articles in this field, including volume 5 of the Cambridge History of Irish Literature in Transition series, published in 2020.
Click here to browse audio recordings of our past events.
Digging into the Archives:
Digging into the Archives with Meltem Gürle