Author: Mike

  • Faction Aims in Boardgames

    A question came up in conversation at this years Board Game Studies colloquium about gaming the Crusades and specifically about the problem of simulating in a game the different objectives of the factions among the Crusaders; objectives which shifted and changed during the course of the First Crusade. A number of games have addressed the…

  • Religion and Society? (1)

    Arguments about separation of church and state in contemporary Ireland are of limited value as long as they fail to address spirituality and society. Repeal of the 8th amendment, the removal of the baptism requirements for primary schools, the removal of the provisions on blasphemy from the constitution and the removal of the Victorian Catholic…

  • Writing yourself

      I describe myself as a “Historian, Digital Humanities, gamer, geek, teaching in Cork, Ireland, occ surfer, pipesmoker, drinks single malt, old fashioned Liberal #CitizenoftheWorld” in my Twitter bio. I freely confess to my first year students that I never really planned this out, and at several points, I made choices which I did not…

  • Summer School 2017

    Outreach to potential future students is a key part of our work, and this post is part of that – while it includes some slides, and will include a link to a video of a presentation, the key element is the use of Hypothes.is to demonstrate open collaborative annotation.

  • What is Digital Humanities, 2017

    Please, Can we have a definition of what we’re doing in this degree? Why yes you can, and here’s this years version: “DH @UCC creates opportunities for students to develop flexible skills in using digital tools and methods to explore and enrich the human experience in the digital age.” This is a question I looked…

  • Open Active Learning

    Digital Humanities at UCC practice open, collaborative pedagogy. We work both within and without the old LMS/VLE. Some of our learning is based on open reflective student writing on blogs and wikis, hosted on Reclaim. Some has been kept inside the safe space of our Blackboard LMS, but we’re tending to use that mainly as…

  • Envisioning Futures

    I’ve offered to run a (hopefully) interactive “workshop” at Octocon on Saturday at 11 to explore how SciFi imagined the future in the past? And how might those visions help us imagine or design the future? Since it’s one of those things where I hope to drag everyone into the discussion, I’ve shared a fuller…

  • What is Research?

    I opted to lead the first week of the UCC Digital Humanities Research Colloquium this year on the question of “What is Research” because I wanted to start the year with a very basic discussion; and I wanted it to be a discussion rather than a lecture. I wanted to bring out some ideas that…

  • Reading Rudé II First Steps

    I sketched out the concept for ‘Reading Rudé’ in Simplemind on my iPad. I’ll discuss the project plan in more detail in a later post, but the first thing I did was to head for the Boole and see if it looked feasible:- I guess you could call this ‘Initial Hypothesis Testing’ but I’m happy…

  • Reading Rudé

    George Rudés “The Crowd in the French Revolution” is a text which has been loved, hated and underlined by university students all over the world. Since I have a long running in understanding how students read, analyse and write historical narratives, those grubby annotations are actually interesting, and I had an idea for a bit…

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