Monday 14 July 2014

Patrick O'Sullivan, ed., The Meaning of the Famine, 1997

At the beginning of this year, 2014 - as part of tidying up projects - I put a lot of my earlier work on this free MediaFire cloud storage site...

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/ooj5btdttc9y4/Documents

It has to be a free site - there isn't a budget to do anything else.  It has worked well.

MediaFire gives me a simple download counter - this does not count people who read the texts online, without downloading.  But it is a measure.  And soon we will reach 2000 downloads since this project began, in January 2014.

MediaFire also offer a more complex statistics package, as part of the paid for, premium upgrade.  But...  there isn't a budget...

Pity really, because over the past weeks there has been an odd little anomaly in the download patterns.  Within a few weeks there have been some 200 downloads of one complete book, Patrick O'Sullivan, ed., The Meaning of the Famine, 1997, Volume 6 of The Irish World Wide.  An odd little glitch and difficult to explain.  Some sort of mad robot harvester? - the patterns do not fit.  A seminar group, somewhere, looking at the research literature on the Irish Famine? - the numbers look too big.

The book is in my thoughts because I am in the middle of writing a review article for Irish Historical Studies, about recent developments in the study of the Irish Diaspora, looking especially at the ways in which the Famine has become a central theme.  I need not go over here the problems I had bringing together a volume called The Meaning of the Famine, in 1997 - nor the criticism that my book has faced since then.

I recently read an article by Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley - the historian of famine in China...

Article (Edgerton-Tarpley2013Tough) 
Edgerton-Tarpley, K. 
Tough Choices: Grappling with Famine in Qing China, the British Empire, and Beyond. 
Journal of World History, 2013, 24, 135 - 176


It is a comparative piece, which makes excellent use of my own chapter in The Meaning of the Famine (co-written with Richard Lucking) - my chapter made a good stab at unpacking the coded language of the British mandarin class.

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~histweb/faculty_and_staff/faculty_bios/k_edgerton-tarpley.htm






Saturday 12 July 2014

REPORT: SUPPORTING THE NEXT GENERATION OF THE IRISH DIASPORA

Just come to my attention...

SUPPORTING THE NEXT GENERATION OF THE IRISH DIASPORA
Report of a Research Project Funded by the Emigrant
Support Programme, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade


The Clinton Institute for American Studies is pleased to announce the publication of exciting new research on the topic of the Irish diaspora. More and more, states are seeking to understand the form and functions of diasporas and engage with them to provide new opportunities for knowledge transfer, tourism, conflict resolution, and many other matters. In the context of these emerging interests, Ireland has some prominence as a small nation with an over seventy million strong diaspora. The Irish government, through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), is currently undertaking a comprehnsive review of its engagement with the Irish abroad. This research report scopes the changing profile and needs of Irish emigrants in relation to the Government's strategic objectives in engaging with the diaspora, particularly through the ESP, and considers how best these objectives may continue to be met. 

http://www.ucdclinton.ie/

http://ucdclinton.ie/userfiles/file/Supporting%20the%20Next%20Generation%20of%20the%20Irish%20Diaspora.pdf

TechReport (Kennedy2014SUPPORTING)
Kennedy, L.; Lyes, M. & Russell, M.
SUPPORTING THE NEXT GENERATION OF THE IRISH DIASPORA: Report of a Research Project Funded by the Emigrant Support Programme, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Clinton Institute, University College Dublin, 2014

Thursday 3 July 2014

Gargrave Autoharp Festival, Photographs

There is a small selection of photographs by Andrew Milne, Official Photographer, Gargrave Autoharp Festival, here...