NPPSH Conference

As more and more of daily communication happens through a digital medium, so are “unseen voices” often spoken and sometimes heard within the digital sphere. Especially marginalized and counter-public groups have often used the new media to overcome real-world limitations. This phenomenon can be traced back to the early days of the Web, as projects such as the Transgender Usenet Archive show. Archives like this allow the reconstruction of a community and enable users to experience this part of history. At the same time, an archive of any community’s past helps against misrepresentations. With the growth of data output and the dominance of a few social media platforms, projects like the Transgender Usenet Archive will be harder to accomplish on data created in the present. For the presentation’s first part, I am going to give a brief introduction on what memory means in a digital context and what distinguishes data collections from digital sites of memory that affect our understanding of the past. Moving on from there, I am going to introduce the Transgender Usenet Archive as an example for successful reconstruction of largely unheard voices. This part will be focused on preservation, reconstruction and usage of the data. Finally I will give some examples from current situations which I understand to be lost voices or voices at risk of being lost. Through this, I will explain challenges arising with contemporary Web archiving and hope to be able to give some general principles for preserving currently unseen voices.

Michael Kurzmeier is a PhD candidate in Maynooth University and supervised by Prof Susan Schreibman. His thesis investigates questions of preservation and presentation of digital cultural heritage. The age of digital communication as also the age of massive data collection driven by very different intentions. As those archives serve as memory agents for current and future ways to remember and portrait the past, it is necessary to understand the challenges and opportunities that an increasing digitization of memory brings. Michael received his BA European Literature from Marburg and MA American Studies from Tübingen University.

You can contact Michael on Twitter @mkrzmr and at Mastodon https://makerdon.org/@mkrzmr

This paper explores the insights provided by the old media of novels, to informatic strategies implementable through AR technologies, using Invisible Cities (2010) by Italo Calvino. The social systems that must be traversed in basic everyday life can be labyrinthine and opaque to all but the most indoctrinated. The individual’s experience of the world is guided our by memories and communications with others. Society attempts to create collective actions strategies through which to communicate information, but all too often systems are set up for a normative level of intellect and ability. Managed subjectivity is a vital aspect of literature, as books act as partnerships between authors and readers. There are lessons to be learned from this developed medium which have huge value in guiding good design in new frontiers. Using Critical Disability Theory (Pothier and Devlin, 2006) and concepts such as emotional design (Norman, 2004), and civilising processes/habitus (Bourdieu, 1977; Elias, 2012) the paper argues for inclusive design approaches. The paper attempts to bring lessons from traditional mediums’ narratives to inform the design of informatic strategies for AR/VR/MR. Invisible Cities follows Kublai Khan and Marco Polo as they discuss 55 distinct cities all of which are Venice, all discovered through the consideration of different fundamental aspects of perceptions and human life. These all co-exist layered on top of and intertwined with each other. Every individual experiences the world through their own lens, influenced by their physical and emotional condition, and their context in the world.

Phil J. Ryan is a PhD student in Inclusive Design & Creative Technology Innovation candidate based in SMARTlab, University College Dublin. He works on sociologically informed technological solutions to problems of population movement. He researches migration, bureaucracy, user experience, and inclusive design. His dissertation is titled ‘Bureaucracy Map: An inclusively designed dynamic informatics system for institutional navigation.’

The digital divide has been discussed as a limiting factor in social cohesion, since the early 2000s (Korupp & Szydlik, 2005). Authors suggested that the digital divide was a new form of social inequality, and therefore the term digital exclusion would better reflect the unequal access to digital resources among low socio-economic and ethnic minority groups (Cushman & Klecun, 2006). With the emergence of the smartphone as a relatively cheap and ubiquitous gateway to the digital world, access has somewhat widened for many people. However, a recent study (2018) by OFCOM in the UK reveals that there still is a distinct digital divide: non-users of the internet are more likely to be aged over 65 than users. Knowles & Hanson (2018) propose that despite being more proficient than previous generations, some older people may be rejecting digital technology in protest of an increasingly digital society that they do not trust. Whether rejection, digital exclusion or a myriad of factors, low participation in digital technology may be contributing to social isolation and exclusion among this age group in Ireland, especially in rural areas. Ethnographic methods have the potential to reveal how older people interact with digital technology, and socially, in their everyday lives and thus illuminate any issues of social isolation and exclusion. This paper explores digital exclusion as a social process and discusses preliminary findings from my research into the social lives of older people in the rural South East of Ireland, and their daily use of technology.

Jessica Douglas is a first year PhD student at Waterford Institute of Technology and part of the Research Group of Design and Social Innovation (DASI). Her research is an interdisciplinary study of the social lives of older people in rural South East Ireland and their interaction with technology. She is also Assistant Digital Editor of the Irish Journal of Anthropology. She gained her MA Public Cultures & Society, First Class Honours, from IADT in 2016 and she previously graduated from the University of Liverpool and The University of Sheffield with a BSc and MSc.

Nineteenth-century Ireland saw the spread of Protestant evangelical missionary activism and the establishment of societies determined to bring the good news of salvation to the Roman Catholic population.

Many women immersed themselves in the work. One such activist was Fanny Bellingham. ‘This remarkable woman, whose powers of organisation were as uncommon as her energy and quickness of judgement’ is unseen except through the lives of her male relatives and co-workers. Born in 1808, she was granddaughter of Sir Alan Castlebellingham, a substantial landowner in County Louth and the city of Dublin, William Stewart, merchant, and member of a prominent linen family from County Down . She was a committee member in the Ladies’ Auxiliary to the Irish Society which supplied and funded missionaries and Scripture Readers to follow up on the work of the male Society. With the Dublin brewer and philanthropist, Arthur Guinness, she established the Dublin Visiting Mission in 1848, sending missionaries’ into the back streets and lanes of Dublin teaching Catholics ‘the way of Salvation though Jesus Christ’. She was one of Rev. Alexander Dallas’s ‘most valued and useful aids’ in the foundation of the Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics from 1845 onwards. Married to Rev. Hyacinth D’Arcy of Clifden in Maynooth in 1852, she ‘threw herself heart and soul’ into D’Arcy’s evangelical mission in Connemara. Her fragile health soon broke down under ‘her unremitting exertions’. She died childless, aged forty-six, on 26 June 1854 in Clifden. Her name is not included on D’Arcy’s headstone.

Marion Rogan is a John and Pat Hume scholar in Maynooth University. Her PhD thesis is entitled: The ‘Second Reformation’ in Ireland, 1798-1861: case study of Rev. Robert Winning and the Kingscourt District Publications.’ A retired primary school principal, she lives near Kells, County Meath.

The State’s attempt to alleviate poverty during the nineteenth century culminated into the creation of the Irish Poor Law in 1838, which saw over 150 workhouses erected across the Irish landscape. A particularly vulnerable cohort of impoverished paupers were mothers and infants. This paper will outline the provisions put into place during the period by the State for the nourishment of pauper infants within in the workhouses. By law, deserted infants were entitled to a wet-nurse. This wet-nursing arrangement often took place within the workhouses, but it was also outsourced to country wet-nurses. This paper, using surviving material from the Poor Law commissioners and local workhouses, will examine and contrast individual cases of wet-nursing to assess the viability of the practice in providing adequate relief provision. Breastfeeding experiences within the workhouse, unsurprisingly, did not coincide with the contemporary medical knowledge pertaining to the lifestyle of a breastfeeding mother. Considering the weight the medical profession placed upon their breastfeeding regulations regarding weaning and the ideal diet for a mother, it is important to highlight some of the major differences evident in workhouse breastfeeding in contrast to the idealised version depicted within the medical literature. This will be done by using a case-study centred upon the North Dublin Union (NDU) workhouse. The infant mortality at the NDU workhouse was so alarming in the early 1840s that it had been dubbed ‘Infant Slaughter House’ which resulted into an official inquiry. The findings of this report included concerns about maternal diet, milk quality and the appropriate weaning age of the breastfeed child within the workhouse. Through an assessment of the breastfeeding experiences of orphaned infants and pauper mothers, this paper will highlight the plight of pauper motherhood and infanthood during the period, while also giving voice to a previously unheard and marginalised group of Irish women.

Judy Bolger is a PhD student in Trinity College Dublin, researching for a thesis entitled: 'Mothering in poverty: institutionalised motherhood in Ireland, 1872-1908'. She completed her M.Phil. also at TCD in 2017 and her thesis explored 19th century Irish breastfeeding.

The proposed presentation aims to review the critically acclaimed television series Mrs Browns Boys and its representations of sex, sexual repression and pleasure, and even marital rape. The series relies on a bawdy a coarse humour which heavily incorporates the use of sexual innuendo and slapstick comedy to convey and address serious social issues which, historically and presently, are often silenced, such as that of marital rape – in a brief sketch, Mrs Brown describes her late husband ‘taking advantage of [her] whenever he likes’. Mrs Brown’s Boys further develops on themes of sexual desire and female pleasure and its repression in Irish culture up until the 1990s (and perhaps even beyond). Moreover, when such themes and discussed, often between Mrs Brown and her incumbent friend Winny, ongoing sexual pleasure and need is identified and given voice in an attempt to destigmatise and challenge the view of older women as de-sexed or un-sexual beings. Evidently, despite its (in)famous humour tones and comedic plotlines, Mrs Brown’s Boys is a series which frequently plays on and with narratives incorporating sexual pleasure – or a lack, thereof – and which, moreover, addresses the reality of marital rape at intervals.

Sarah Anne Dunne is a third-year doctoral candidate at UCD currently researching the manifestations of rape culture which occurs on social media networks. This passion piece emerges in response to both her interest in the subject and her love of Agnes Brown.