Thursday 14 April 2016

On Thursday, the Sports Centre remembers the 90's. For free classes to 90's music, click here.

Memory in a Digital Age:

Collecting, Accessing and Forgetting

(9.00am-1.30pm) Book here.

Half day seminar in conjunction with the Library of Trinity College Dublin’s programme of events for 2015- 2016

“The Library of the Future; the Future of the Library”

The digital age has enabled an unprecedented era of creativity, innovation and knowledge-sharing but has also created new challenges for documenting and preserving contemporary knowledge and culture.  With such a vast amount of digital content available how do we decide what we keep, how we access it and what we want to delete.  Over the course of this half day seminar a number of expert speakers will address these issues and attempt to answer these questions.

Chaired by: Karlin Lillington, The Irish Times

9.00 Introduction and Welcome:

Helen Shenton, Librarian and College Archivist, TCD

9.15am Collecting

(presented by Trinity College Dublin Library)

Library staff will present three lightning talks to illustrate the Library’s role in initiatives focused on ensuring ‘at risk’ digital content survives for future generations. 

• Margaret Flood, Keeper, Collection Management
  Going, going gone - What can libraries do about the digital black hole?
  
• Arlene Healy, Sub-Librarian, Digital Systems and Services
  Mandated  Digital Collecting  - UK  Non-Print Legal Deposit
  
• Dr Christoph Schmidt Supprian, Sub-Librarian Collection Management 
  Voluntary Digital Collecting - edepositIreland
• Dr Brendan Power, Post-Doctoral Researcher
  Voluntary Digital Collecting -  The 1916 Rising Web-Archiving Project

10.15am Coffee Break

10.45am Accessing

(presented by the School of English)

Dr. Mark Sweetnam, Assistant Professor, School of English

"Six by nine. Forty two." or How to Ask the Ultimate Question

Hamlet's protestation that he 'could be bounded in a nutshell', and count himself 'a king of infinite space' seems to have a special application to scholars in the twenty first century. The mass digitisation of our heritage, of the texts, images, and artefacts that are the stuff of culture has allowed us to be bounded by a desk, if not a nutshell, and yet to access an enormous richness of information, which seems to be veering exponentially to infinity. But these opportunities bring their challenges, and the old wineskins of established methodologies often balloon and burst under the influx of new, digital wine. And the search for new wineskins has not gone smoothly. It was in 2006 that Gregory Crane first asked 'what do you do with a million books?' - a question that we still struggle to answer. In this talk, I'll be identifying some of the fundamental methodological challenges that are raised by the proliferation of digitised resources, and discussing some of the ways in which these challenges might be addressed.

Mark Sweetnam is Assistant Professor in English with Digital Humanities at Trinity College Dublin, where he directs the M. Phil. in Digital Humanities and Culture. He specialises in the early modern period, with a particular interest in religion and the formation of cultural identity. His work in digital humanities focuses on digital scholarly editing, humanities-led design, and user engagement.

Dr. Seamus Lawless, Assistant Professor, School of Computer Science.

Why search is hard, and why search in cultural heritage is REALLY hard

Searching, discovering and accessing digital information is difficult. Technologies which support digital information retrieval face challenges related to scale, format, language, user intent and preference, amongst many more. The emergence of Digital Humanities and the movement to preserve, in digital form, collections of cultural heritage material has created a whole new set of challenges for Information Retrieval technologies. In this talk, I will be discussing these challenges and presenting some examples of how they are being tackled.

Séamus Lawless is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin. Séamus' research has a strong user focus and all of his work aims to improve the experiences of users when interacting with content. His research interests are in the areas of information retrieval, information management and digital humanities with a particular focus on adaptivity and personalisation. The common focus of this research is digital content management and the application of technology to support enhanced, personalised access to knowledge. 

11.45am Break

12.00pm Forgetting

(presented by the School of Law)

Antoin Ó Lachtnain, Digital Rights Ireland (DRI)

The virtue of privacy in a digital age

In the context of digital memory, what we keep private, what we delete, what we delete, is just as important as what we curate, access and remember. The comprehensive and everlasting memory of the digital realm remembers what is sometimes better forgotten, and this has profound implications for us all. Information privacy rights, including the EU's right to be forgotten, may help - even if they are not the complete solution.

Antoin Ó Lachtnáin <https://ie.linkedin.com/in/antoin> graduated from TCD with a degree in psychology and philosophy in 2003. He is a director of Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) <https://www.digitalrights.ie/>, an NGO dedicated to defending Civil, Human and Legal rights in a digital age. In particular, DRI is working to protect the fundamental right to privacy through court action at national and European level and through public activism. He is also a director of exmuris <http://www.exmuris.com/>, a consultancy which delivers product, marketing, IT and financial solutions in complex, regulated markets, especially in the areas of utilities, financial services and regulated sectors. He tweets at @antoin and blogs at eire.com <http://www.eire.com/>

Digital Rights Ireland have taken a case in the Irish and European courts to challenge laws which have, for more than decade, required mobile phone companies and ISPs to retain data relating to their subscribers' location, calls, texts and emails for up to two years. The Court of Justice of the European Union down the European law providing for the retention of this data, and held that this type of mass surveillance of the entire population constituted a disproportionate invasion of privacy (see case C-293/12 Digital Rights Ireland v Minister for Communications <http://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?num=C-293/12>). The case has now returned to the Irish courts, where DRI now seeks to have the equivalent national Irish laws struck down as well.

Malachy Browne, Managing Editor & Europe Anchor of Reported.ly

What is the first rough draft of history in a digital age?

What we decide to forget or delete are important issues for journalists as well as for librarians, academics, lawyers, NGOs, and civic society. Although we benefit from digital memories, the capacity to forget is also valuable. If, as Phil Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, once said, journalism is a first rough draft of history, then journalists working in a digital age face particular challenges in what is recorded for posterity and what is forgotten. On the one hand, digital “evidence lockers” would ensure that media related to human rights is downloaded and saved in a way that preserves metadata and other important information, so that it can potentially be used in future prosecutions and investigations by journalists, NGOs and human rights actors. On the other hand, as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues in "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age" (Princeton University Press, 2011) <http://www.amazon.co.uk/Delete-The-Virtue-Forgetting-Digital/dp/0691150362> not being able to leave the past behind can make us more unforgiving in the digital age than ever before. In this talk, Malachy will therefore discuss the benefits and costs, from a social and journalistic perspective, of forgetting or deleting digital data.

Malachy Browne <https://www.linkedin.com/in/malachybrowne> is Managing Editor & Europe Anchor of Reported.ly <http://www.reported.ly> at First Look Media <https://firstlook.org/>. He was co-founder and Editor-at-Large at Politico.ie, and News Editor at Storyful.com, and he worked for the political magazine, Village, where he ran the magazine's website, Village.ie.

Malachy takes an interest in international politics, conflict, social justice and human rights. He has covered the Arab Spring, conflicts in Ivory Coast, Syria and Ukraine, humanitarian crises from Somalia’s famine to Typhoon Haiyan, global civil rights movements, and the response to Europe’s economic crisis. He has written about eyewitness media and citizen networks for Al Jazeera, Open Democracy and the European Journalism Centre's Verification Handbook. Formerly a computer programmer, Malachy enjoys newsroom innovation and creating technology that powers journalism and human rights work.

William Kilbride (Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition)

Forgetting to remember: if we want to preserve anything we will need to dispose of something

Fears over data misuse, sometimes misplaced, can lead to surprising outcomes.  While the ‘right to be forgotten’ remains critically ill-defined in the context of a burgeoning digital universe,  we can at least agree that there is an innocent party in all of this. Abuse of data is not the fault of the data.  Perhaps we need a more sophisticated and more generally relevant appreciation of the ethics of information processing.  But as we wait for enlightenment, the data grows, the weaknesses proliferate and the case law stacks up.  CIO’s take fright; risk-averse public servants lose their nerve; data is blamed.  There is a right to forget just as surely as there is a right to memory. But forgetfulness has fear on its side and data seems to be the victim.   Can forgetfulness and memory be reconciled in the digital age?  Archivists have long known that forgetting (which they call disposal) is a necessary pre-condition of remembering (which they call retention); archaeologists implicitly understand this too, or Dublin would be thick with Vikings and saints.  Our still immature digital culture cannot but tend in the same direction.  Data volumes are overwhelming storage, and economics will soon overtake both.  If we’re going to remember anything, we’re going have to dispose of something.  If we can decide what we want to retain we can decide what to relinquish.  Digital preservation, it turns out, is the art of knowing what to delete.  The challenge of our generation is to choose wisely. 

William Kilbride is Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), a not-for-profit membership organization providing advocacy, workforce development, capacity and partnership in digital preservation.  Trinity College Library was a founding member of the DPC in 2002.  William started his career in archaeology in the 1990s when the discipline’s enthusiasm for new technology outstripped its capacity to manage the resulting data.  He joined the DPC from Glasgow Museums where he was Research Manager and before that was Assistant Director of the Archaeology Data Service in the University of York.  Before that he was a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Glasgow where he retains an honorary position.

1.00pm Questions & Answers with all speakers

Venue: Printing House, TCD
This free event is open to the public, but booking is required. Click here to book.

10.00am–3.00pm The First International Conference of Ultimology

A Trinity Creative Challenge Prize Winner

Ultimology is the study of that which is dead or dying in a series or process. When applied to academic disciplines, it becomes the study of extinct or endangered subjects, theories, and tools of learning. This inaugural conference brings together researchers and practitioners from inside and outside Trinity to explore the concept of Ultimology and how it relates to their field of knowledge.

Venue: Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub
Booking is required for this event, please click here to book.

3.30pm–6.00pm By Heart’: poems and prose recited from memory, in honour of Brendan Kennelly

Co-chaired by Dr Sarah Smyth (Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies) and Dr Philip Coleman (School of English).

Dust off that Leaving Cert poetry book and join us for an open mic style afternoon of poems and prose recited from memory. All languages are welcome. Alternatively, come and listen to poems by colleagues and invited guests in English, Irish and many other languages. This event will conclude with a section devoted to the work of Brendan Kennelly on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

Followed by Reception

Venue: Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub
Booking is advised for this event, click here to book.

6.00pm Film Screening: A reflection on light

A Trinity Creative Challenge 2015 prize winner.

Screening of artist Grace Weir’s film ‘A reflection on light’ in the Schrödinger theatre with a live musical accompaniment by composer Dr. Linda Buckley and guests. Curated associated works by Dr. Yvonne Scott in the George Fitzgerald Library.

Venue: Schrödinger Theatre, Physics Building, TCD
Booking is required for this event, please click here to book.

7.30pm Uhta! The Last Part of the Night

In the darkest moment before dawn comes a time called Uhta when night, as black as oil, rules the world. Corporations. Oil. Dictators. A Poet. A Nun. Activists. When all these things come together, someone’s going to die. And it’s usually not the dictators.

From the Manchester Theatre Award winning Come As You Arts (winner 2012, nominee 2014) comes a musical journey based on the true story of the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Nine, and the powerful friendship of an Irish nun with the Nobel Prize Nominee during his final years.

Filled with a mingling of dance and music, imagination and reality, light and shadow, Uhta! is a story of brotherhood and sisterhood across boundaries of race, belief and nationality that explores, with humour and pathos, a man’s last night on earth when time past and time future all point to his present. 

Uhta! was devised from the memories and writings of those involved.

Venue: Players Theatre, TCD

This is a free event, but booking is required. Click here to book.

Duration: 70 minutes, no intermission