Tag: History & Humanities

  • World Classics

    Why are Greek and Latin ‘Classics’ and not Chinese? There is no real answer to this question, which popped out of some twittering I was doing just now with Dave Parry.  It is hard to argue with Dave’s position which is that this represents a European cultural bias. If we redefine classics in world rather…

  • Beamish Sheets Got Y2Ked

    Shawn Day, of the DHO, showed some inspiring visualisations at last weeks digital humanities  seminar in the Boole Library which he’d done in his work on the brewing industry in Guelph in the nineteenth century. I have made several runs at turning all or parts of  my old MA thesis on the history of Beamish…

  • Jarre-ing quote?

    Critics of Wikipedia will no doubt crow over the latest hoax in which a Dublin student inserted a faked quote into the article on Maurcie Jarre which was picked up by several papers. I’m not very concerned – history is full of faked quotes, and at least in Wikipedia we can see what user account…

  • Crying WHOlf?

    Raising the Pandemic Alert level to 5 shows how crude the WHO system of pandemic threat levels is – one more notch and we’re all dead? Surely not. News media all over the world are obviously featuring the story, but many people will find a Level 5 alert on a 6 point scale unduly alarmist…

  • Age of Misery, 1973-20??

    One of my graduate students remarked the other day on how miserable his thesis topic – the 2006 war in Lebanon – is; and it led me to point out to him how miserable contemporary history is now compared to what it used to be when I was young. I recalled a remark made by…

  • `Black Bob’ Craufurd and Ireland, 1798—1804

    Bob Crauford is most known for his leadership of light infantry in the Peninsular War – Sharpe fans will have found him mentioned in passing – but current issue of  ‘War in History’ has an excellent article on his reaction to Irish politcs as a result of his service here between 1798 and 1804.  His…

  • Quoted

    I was quoted in The Irish Times yesterday, in a good piece by Brian O’Connell on digital archives and political history.  After pointing out that Alexander the Great’s lack of email or Twitter is not an obstacle to writing about him, I got a good finish with “It’s all about people really, and while people…

  • Swop Finance Ministers and we’ll fight again!

    Well, faith and begoraah but isn’t it great to be Irish today? The government actually made a decision (quick – when was the last time an Irish cabinet made a decision?) to guarantee all savings in Irish banks and now cash is flowing from the UK into Dublin; to such an extent that Alasdair Darling…

  • Medieval Mobile Boring?

    For game that does so much well at the tactical level, Medieval Total War on mobile phones is very disappointing as a strategic game. Clearly, the team who ported the PC game to the J2ME platform have a very good hexmap based, IGUO engine for fighting pre-modern battles, but the strategy and diplomacy end is…

  • Charlie Wilson’s War

    Charlie Wilsons War is a book which should get onto quite a few academic reading lists as an interesting case study in several areas – it sheds light on the workings of US government and politics, on how some clandestine agencies work, at least some of the time, and is one of the most interesting…

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