James G. R. Cronin

[Click on title to access link] The Avant is based on ongoing conversations, and conversation, to my mind, is the soul of culture. Fergal Gaynor

[Click on title for link] The Paradox of Technology: What’s Gained and Lost? is a paper written a decade ago C. A. Bowers, an American educator. It is still relevant and thought-provoking. Written during the late 90s, Bowers argued that Western society was becoming dependent on communication technologies that it understood in terms of application, but was unable to fully appreciate the connections between the culturally diverse forms of knowledge that it was losing through the introduction of such ubiquitous technologies. Bowers makes a number of thought-provoking observations: 1. Computers amplify explicit, context-free forms of knowledge, while their programmers usually overlook implicit and culturally specific analog experiences and ways of knowing. 2. Computers amplify a conduit view of language, while hiding the metaphorically layered nature of language, as well as masking how language on the screen reproduces a specific form of cultural intelligence. 3. Computers amplify a Wester...

Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts 7 - 9 September 2009 Queens University, Belfast REGISTRATION OPEN Keynote Speakers: PROFESSOR STEVE BENFORD (University of Nottingham) Trajectories Through Mixed Reality Performance DR ANDREW GREEN (National Library of Wales) Big Digitisation: Where Next? PROFESSOR JANE OHLMEYER (Trinity College, Dublin) and MARIE WALLACE (IBM) Dealing with Dirty Data: Theory and Practice The conference will address the following themes: * the impact of data on scholarship and wider society * how innovations become mainstream through mutation and imitation * digitisation of scholarly editions and cultural heritage * digital representation of time, space and locality * digital preservation and sustainability * user engagement and social participation * the impact of narrative and design in the Arts and Humanities on ICT and vice versa * education and the digital humanities and arts * the theory and practice of creating and documenting digital arts C...

It was with great satisfaction that I recently received a copy of Information technology and constructivism in higher education: progressive learning frameworks , edited by Carla Payne and published by IGI-Global. Having collaborated with two colleagues from Cork on a chapter for a year it was good to finally see the volume brought to completion. Broadly speaking, the value of the work is in its attempt to open a debate on the value of embedding online tools and resources within a curriculum for its own sake. Critics argue that the Internet has tended to reinforce learning-as-information accumulation, the antithesis of critical enquiry and appropriation of information through practice as advocated by constructivist educational models (Coulter and Mandell, 2009). It is clearly apparent that the “shiny new toys” syndrome is fading and that debates are focusing on a need to clarify attitudes towards technology usage. Technology is still a tool and the success or failure in exploiting it v...

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault in 1984. Foucault Across the Disciplines provides a forum for assessing and reassessing the impact of Michel Foucault’s thought across the disciplines over 25 years. Hayden White's paper re-assessing Foucault's impact on historical studies is particularly interesting. Foucault's work has had far reaching implications for the way we perceive visual studies and the study of history itself. For Foucault, writing in the late 1960s, disciplinary licensing had its origins in the 18th Century Enlightenment, yet it still remains a salient feature of contemporary 21st Century Western society. One may argue that disciplinary formation both establishes group identity and set groups apart from each other. Foucault argued that the formation of disciplines such as the sciences or the humanities involved the "disciplining" of language itself. Each discipline has a particular language and particular codes of conduc...

[click on the title bar] Cork was the recent venue for a two-day symposium and workshop in the Digital Humanities. The sessions presented themes, methods and trends in digital humanities, highlighting current research projects and offering participants an opportunity to interact with experts to identify new opportunities. Dr. Shawn Day, Digital Humanities Observatory , presented an interesting session on how different online visualisation tools could be used to enhance disciplinary understandings in the humanities. Visualisation is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualisation can help make the data easier to read or understand. Data visualisation is currently an active area of research, teaching and development. The term unites the established field of scientific visualisation and the more recent field of information visualisation. The reason for its successful appropriation across disciplinary fields is due to a sound basic premise, ...