Deep Maps: West Cork Coastal Cultures (2015 – 2017)

Deep Maps: West Cork Coastal Cultures (2015 – 2017) develops and uses novel transdisciplinary research techniques that bridge between arts and humanities research and marine biology. The project stimulated public discourse on biodiversity, conservation, climate change, fisheries, aquaculture, pollution, policy and legislation.

This project was funded by the Irish Research Council New Horizons Award and was led by UCC researchers: Professor Claire Connolly (School of English and Digital Humanities) and Prof Rob McAllen (School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences). Deep Maps supported five research assistants and one postdoctoral researcher.

This page outlines the project’s purpose, aims, methods, and outcomes, along with online access to archived materials

The Challenge

Connecting cultural history and marine biological research, Deep Maps fosters ongoing stewardship of Cork’s coast and Ireland’s maritime heritage. The project visualises the coastline in innovative ways and offers a comprehensive approach to understanding place. Deep Maps engages community stakeholders to identify environmental priorities and share their knowledge. Past and present are interwoven as literature, history, science and culture provide new ways of thinking about our endangered marine environment. The project maps the cultural history of the coastline in order to communicate a deeper knowledge of places, history, people and stories.

The Research

Both intensive and extensive, Deep Maps investigates the biological, cultural and historical contexts of the south west coast of Ireland from 1700 to 1920, exploring the maritime environment found along the arc of Cork’s Roaring Water Bay, from Clonakilty to Bantry Bay. In bringing literary traditions together with environmental sciences and digital technologies, Deep Maps demonstrates how coastal sites are reservoirs of personal, cultural and biological data. Knowledge flows from and to community stakeholders, with the goal of increasing public awareness of the rich but intangible heritage of the region. This results in layered storytelling that effectively expresses complex accounts of space and time. As such, Deep Maps departs from literal cartography to bring history, culture and biology together in original visualisations that can be accessed digitally.

The Impact

Deep Maps responds to needs emerging from both humanities and STEM research: in the case of the former, the environmental humanities have posed urgent questions about the scope and scale of human interactions with the environment as represented in literature and other texts; while in the case of marine biology, scientists are increasingly aware of the need to deepen and enrich their understanding of coastal environments via a more nuanced sense of the histories and cultures of these storied places. This transdisciplinary approach draws upon:

• A scientific literature review;
• Workshops with community stakeholders;
• Sketches, photographs, poems, newspapers, letters and other historical artefacts; and
• Collection and analysis of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data.

The project uses digital media to visualise and connect different kinds of knowledge about the coastline, and establishes dialogue with diverse audiences. This included:

• A weekly blog series which has reached audiences in Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Russia, Canada, Germany, France and Italy
• Integrated social media campaigns via Facebook, Twitter, Storify and Instagram;
• An open access Deep Maps website, incorporating interactive story maps, timelines and apps; and
• An exhibition within the Glucksman Gallery on the UCC campus, which ran from 4 August - 5 November 2017, that engaged public feedback by taking visitors on a journey from traditional cartography through objects of cultural value and scientific inquiry.

Other engagement included:

• Artwork, storytelling and surveys with primary school students and teachers at Coomhola National School, Bantry; Rath National School, Baltimore; and the Educate Together National School, Cork City;
• Academic presentations in Dingle, Co. Kerry; Cardiff, Wales; Sesimbra, Portugal; South Bend, Indiana, United States; Cork City, Co. Cork; and other locations;
• New collaborations with Skibbereen Heritage Centre; West Cork College; St Peter’s Church; Cork Nature Network; and others;

Scholarly outcomes:

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/777001

Cited in:

https://www.literarygeographies.net/index.php/LitGeogs/article/view/120

The World Tree Project

The World-Tree Project is the first large-scale community collection initiative in the field of Old Norse-Icelandic and Viking Studies. The Project aims to create an interactive digital archive for the teaching and study of Norse and Viking cultures that will be of benefit to both the scholarly community and the wider public. Through community collection, the World-Tree Project will bring together the incredible diversity of resources on the Vikings - ranging from digitised museum collections to reports on living history events - and use this material to create interpretative exhibitions, teaching aids and interactive resources. We will also use the material we collect to begin to map responses to Norse and Viking heritage in Europe and to test new models for heritage engagement and knowledge exchange. The archive will be launched with an international conference on community engagement with the Vikings.

You can visit our collection website here

Through the varied activities of exploring, raiding, trading and settling, the Vikings came to define a dynamic period of European history, characterised by huge disruption to settled
societies but also an unprecedented level of cultural contact and exchange. Because the activities of the Vikings had an impact across Europe, there is a high level of scholarly and public interest in Norse culture internationally, but also significant regional variation in the way that the Viking past is taught, studied and interpreted in a heritage context. Collaborative initiatives such as the recent Vikings exhibition curated by the National Museums of Denmark, Britain and Germany have further highlighted the transnational appeal of the Viking past. However, such initiatives have also drawn attention to the fact that this common heritage is relevant in different ways for different populations within the European Research Area, and that it needs to be translated with collective access and community-specific interaction in mind. There is currently no platform which exploits the possibilities offered by crowdsourcing to draw together information and resources
on the Vikings in a European context, and which showcases the incredible diversity of available resources, from digitised museum collections to teaching materials produced by scholars and amateur enthusiasts.

The specific project objectives are to:

• Collect digital resources relating to the Viking past, with submissions solicited from both the general public and from targeted individuals and institutions in Ireland, the UK, Denmark and Iceland
• Collate, describe and contextualise these submissions for scholarly and public use, using Dublin Core metadata standards
• Create the first open-access digital archive of material relating to the teaching and study of Old Norse-Viking culture in a European context
• Present the archive as an interpretative exhibit and map responses to Viking heritage across the regions under discussion
• Interpret the archive via the dedicated community-collection / web-publishing platform Omeka and traditional peer-reviewed publications
• Launch the archive with an international conference on community engagement with the Viking past

‌‌Central Research Questions

• How can we overcome barriers of language, culture and access to create interdisciplinary resources that reflect the diversity of responses to the Viking Age in a European context?

• What are the most effective ways to collect, translate and exhibit resources on the Viking Age for different end-users?

• In what ways can digital technologies and crowdsourcing facilitate knowledge exchange, and revolutionise our study of and engagement with the Viking past?

• How do different communities respond to a shared Viking inheritance, and what are the historical and cultural factors that influence this engagement?

•  What role do virtual archives and exhibits have as teaching resources both inside and outside the academy?

Project Team

The PI on the Project is Dr. Tom Birkett, lecturer in the School of English, UCC Person to Person Interview Tom Birkett

The Postdoctoral Researcher on the Project is Dr Roderick Dale

The World Tree Project is is 15 month project, funded by an Irish Research Council 'New Horizons' Starter Grant

Digital Edgeworth Network

The PI on the Project is Dr. Tom Birkett, lecturer in the School of English, UCC Person to Person Interview Tom Birkett

The Postdoctoral Researcher on the Project is Dr Roderick Dale

The World Tree Project is is 15 month project, funded by an Irish Research Council 'New Horizons' Starter Grant