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Digital Archives and the Irish Commemorative Impulse: Gender, Identity, and Digital Cultural Heritage

Smyth, Hannah; (2021) Digital Archives and the Irish Commemorative Impulse: Gender, Identity, and Digital Cultural Heritage. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London). Green open access

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Abstract

The current ‘Decade of Centenaries’ (2012-2023) in the Republic of Ireland has created a pretext for funding high-profile national digitisation projects. During this decade, digital archives have become part of the public experience of commemoration in a way they were not before. Social media also emerged as a prominent mode of communicating the commemorations online, leaving behind an historical record of engagement. Releases of state digital archives have been aligned with key anniversaries, notably in 2016, and has set a precedent for digitisation as a new ritual of commemoration in this late-modern remembrance culture. Online engagement built towards and spiked between March and April 2016, and though it is a burgeoning area of interest in digital history and memory studies Twitter as a source for the systematic study of contemporary commemoration in Ireland has been little explored. In this context, this thesis demonstrates how the profusion of digital archives and online engagement with heritage emphasises the digital space as a territory for the performance of remembrance culture, underpinned by a critical heritage and feminist discourse. Taking three centennial collections as case studies, it demonstrates how ‘digitisations may be recognized as vibrant and historically situated sources in their own right’ even as they instantiate Irish cultural and collective memory and identity. Using digital humanities methods, it further substantiates the ways in which Twitter was (re)appropriated for the commemorations for feminist ends. Commemorating the 1916 Easter Rising continues to be a powerful reference point in defining and redefining Irish cultural identity. This thesis shows how both digital commemorative archives and Twitter have been mobilized in articulating national identity during this decade of commemorations, as well as in critical remembrance around the centenary of the Easter Rising, challenging inequality and authorised commemoration.

Type: Thesis (Doctoral)
Qualification: Ph.D
Title: Digital Archives and the Irish Commemorative Impulse: Gender, Identity, and Digital Cultural Heritage
Event: University College London
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © The Author 2021. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request.
Keywords: commemoration, digital archives, Ireland, Heritage, Feminism, Critical Heritage Studies, Digitisation, Decade of Centenaries, Social Media, Identity
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Information Studies
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10125394
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