Tag: History & Humanities

  • Fun with Hansard

    Francis Bernard Beamish, of the Cork brewing family, served from time to time as MP for Cork in the mid-1800s, and when I was doing my research masters on the history of Beamish & Crawford, I dug his contributions out of the printed volumes of the House of Commons Debates. He didn’t have a lot…

  • Building an open essay writing process

    Assessment in the Humanities in university still depends heavily on “the essay”, either as a paper or in an examination. Any survey of syllabii in the humanities and liberal arts will bear this out – the bulk of our marks go for the abilty to write essays of varying length, from 1,500 words up 6,000-8,000…

  • Academic Publishing Rip-Offs, Part XVII??

    I’ve just seen more evidence that academic publishing, and the research assessment mechanisms based on it, are fatally broken – yet another over priced journal on a narrow field and three books I should read priced at $180 each. I don’t agree with burning books, but I’ll happily torch some publishers

  • Parnell Rd

    By happy accident, I followed a tweet to the walking papers project, which is a project to improve the data in the Open StreetMap project, and found myself looking at a map of part of Fremantle with a Parnell Rd slap bang in the middle, right off Clontarf St, and I immediately asked myself why…

  • Wikileaks, Fractal and Fractional history

    It may seem strange that a historian would argue that Wikileaks publication of the Afghan War Logs was a waste of time, but it was, and it was possibly harmful. Todays followup, the posting of a huge encrypted “insurance” file on the Wikileaks site, looks like a juvenile stunt ,  copied from a cheap novel.

  • Back on Bitnet..

    I found a really old post on bit.listerv.history from 1992 which shows I’ve been saying the same stuff for almost 20 years (and still can’t type properly) “I agree that many people end up in humanities undergrad courses due to a lack of direction, or failure to get into other faculties; and I accept there…

  • Subversion

    I’m looking for some (moderately) radical students to help subvert the top-down model that dominates the Irish university sector. I do a quite a bit of research in the Scholarship of  Teaching and Learning, and I have a couple of things going on which I am keen to open up a bit and get some…

  • Boyne Walk in the Wet

    The Battle of the Boyne was the largest single battle fought in Ireland, and I recently had the opportunity to walk the site with the Military History Society of Ireland on a typically wet Irish summer day. The walk was led by Dr Harman Murtagh, the society President, who played a key role in the…

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