About

Digital Methods and Data Literacy Project

This is an interdisciplinary initiative to embed digital methodologies and data literacy into teaching and learning across UCD with the participation of the schools of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy; Computer Science; English, Drama, Film and Creative Writing; Information and Communication Studies; History and the History of Art.

Funding: We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the The National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

The primary aims of the project are to:

  • Equip students and lecturers across the disciplines to use all of the digital tools and resources at their disposal.
  • Encourage creative, critical and innovative approaches to working with data.
  • Equip students to engage with rapidly changing technologies in the workplace and become engaged and independent citizens of a data driven world.

This website aims to inspire students to explore the wealth of open-source digital projects, archives, e-editions, datasets and websites available to them without university or personal subscriptions. The website features links to freely available digital tools that can be deployed alongside traditional scholarly methods to creatively explore these resources and facilitate new pathways to understanding. We will continue to build the resources on this site over the coming months.


Project Team


Principal Investigator


Professor Gerardine Meaney, UCD School of English, Drama and Film.

Gerardine Meaney MRIA is Professor of Cultural Theory in the UCD School of English, Drama and Film, and Director of the UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics. Her current research interests are in gender, ethnic and national identities in literature and culture and the application of new digital methodologies to humanities research. She is the recent recipient of the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant of €2.5 million for her study focused on migration and culture. This 5 year project entitled “VICTEUR: European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture’ will involve text analysis of nearly 36,000 books, in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus, shared by them in digital format with the research team. The study will use big data to address a key unanswered societal question, how does migration impact on the cultural identity of both migrant and host communities in the historical long-term. She co-ordinates the undergraduate ‘Social Networks in Fiction’ module which combines the teaching of literary history and digital methodologies.


Team Members


Professor John Brannigan, UCD School of English, Drama and Film (Head of School).

John Brannigan has research interests in the twentieth-century literatures of Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales, with a particular focus on the relationships between literature and social and cultural identities. His first book, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998), was a study of the leading historicist methodologies in late twentieth-century literary criticism. He has since published two books on the postwar history of English literature (2002, 2003), leading book-length studies of Brendan Behan (2002) and Pat Barker (2005), and Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (2009). His most recent book, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890-1970 (2014), explores new ways of understanding the relationship between literature, place and environment in 20th-century Irish and British writing.

Associate Professor Marc Caball, UCD School of History

Marc Caball is an historian and associate professor in UCD School of History. He is the lead investigator on the Irish Research Council funded project ‘Mapping readers and readership in Dublin, 1826-1926: a new cultural geography’. His research centres on the cultural history of early modern Ireland in an Atlantic context. In 2017 he published ‘Kerry 1600-1730: the emergence of a British Atlantic county’. He has extensive experience of research policy and funding at national and European levels. He was chairman of the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Domain Committee for Individuals, Cultures, Societies and Health from 2008 to 2014.

Professor Hugh Campbell, UCD School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy

In September 2008, Hugh took up the position of Professor of Architecture at UCD. His research interests include modern and contemporary architecture in Ireland, the relationship between photography, architecture and built space and the visual culture of cities. His recent publications include the edited volume Architecture 1600- 2000, volume 4 of the RIAi/Yale UP production Art and Architecture of Ireland (2014); a special issue of Architecture and Culture on Architecture and Film, edited with Igea Troiani. I have supervised and examined numerous PhDs, with current work including research on late nineteenth-century photography, the use of film in architectural education and the work of Jean Prouvé.

Associate Professor Lucy Collins, UCD School of English, Drama and Film.

A graduate of TCD, where she completed both her BA and PhD degrees, she spent a year at Harvard University on a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research interests are in poetry and poetics; recent publications include Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (2015), Poetry by Women in Ireland 1870-1970: A Critical Anthology (2012) and a co-edited collection of essays Aberration in Modern Poetry (2011). She has published widely on individual poets from Ireland, Britain and America and has a particular interest in gender issues and in ecocriticism. A co-edited anthology, The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics, was published by Cork University Press in 2014. She is co-founder of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive, a national digital repository.

Doctor Derek Greene, UCD School of Computer Science.

Dr. Derek Greene is Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, and a Funded Investigator at the SFI Insight Centre for Data Analytics and the SFI VistaMilk Research Centre. He has over 15 years’ experience in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, with a PhD in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin, and over 50 research papers presented at international conferences and published in journals. He currently leads a research group which focuses on developing algorithms for social network analysis and text mining. He is also involved in a range of interdisciplinary projects which involve applying machine learning methods in areas such as digital humanities, smart agriculture, and political science.

Professor Margaret Kelleher, UCD School of English, Drama and Film.

Margaret Kelleher is Professor and Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. Her books include The Feminization of Famine (published by Duke UP and Cork UP, 1997), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006), co-edited with Philip O’Leary, and Ireland and Quebec: Interdisciplinary Essays on History, Culture and Society (Four Courts Press, 2016), co-edited with Michael Kenneally. Her monograph entitled The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland was published by UCD Press in 2018 and was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books in Language and Culture by the American Conference for Irish Studies in Spring 2019. She was guest editor, with Nicholas Wolf, of Éire-Ireland’s special issue on “Ireland and the Contemporary” (Spring/Summer 2017).

Associate Professor Naomi McAreavey, UCD School of English, Drama and Film and and Vice Principal for Teaching and Learning, College of Arts and Humanities..

I teach on Shakespeare and Renaissance literature at undergraduate level, co-ordinate the MA in Renaissance Literature and Culture, and in 2013-16 supervised a PhD on the life writing of the Boyle women. I completed my Graduate Diploma in University Teaching and Learning in 2013, and was the recipient of UCD’s President’s Teaching Award 2012 in recognition of excellence in teaching. More recently in 2017 I received a Teaching Excellence Award from the College of Arts and Humanities. I served as Head of Teaching and Learning for the School of English, Drama and Film in 2016-17 and am now Vice Principal for Teaching and Learning in the College of Arts and Humanities.

Associate Professor Lynda Mulvin, UCD School of Art History.

Dr Lynda Mulvin has a specialist background and interest in classical antiquity and architectural history. Her expertise in these areas informs undergraduate courses on classical and Irish medieval art and architecture as well as reception of antiquity in the Nineteenth century. She is the coordinator of new UCD BA Humanities Pathways with Schools of Classics, History, Irish Celtic Studies and Folklore and Archaeology. She is PI and has secured EU CREATIVE EUROPE funding for EU project Connecting Early Medieval Cultures CEMEC 2015-2019 with travelling exhibition and published catalogue “Crossroads Travellers in Early Middle Ages, 300-1000 AD” and and has a chapter in Royal Irish Academy volume on Ireland in Europes Eye on Irish ‘peregrini’ monks in Europe in the early middle ages

Professor Eugenia Siapera, UCD School of Information and Communication Studies (Head of School).

Eugenia Siapera is Professor of Information and Communication Studies and head of the ICS School at UCD. Prior to this, she has held positions at DCU, Aristotle University, Greece, University of Leicester, UK and University of Amsterdam, NL. Her research interests are in the area of digital and social media, political communication and journalism. She has recently completed an IRC-funded project on racist hate speech in the Irish digital sphere, and is also working on a project on the digital memory of conflict (RePAST) funded by the European Commission. She has written numerous articles and book chapters, and her most recent book is Understanding New Media (Sage, 2018, second edition). She is currently working on an edited volume on Gendered Cyber Hate (Palgrave, 2019) with Debbie Ging.

Doctor Maria Mulvany, UCD School of English, Drama and Film. Research and Training Coordinator.

Maria Mulvany completed her PhD in 2016 on the topic of spectrality and transgenerational trauma in contemporary Irish historical fiction. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, critical theory, contemporary Irish literature and the historical novel. She has previously worked as part of the IRC-funded Nation, Gender, Genre Project: A Comparative Social Network Analysis of Irish and British fiction 1800-1922. She co-edited (with Gerardine Meaney and Karen Wade) a new multimedia edition of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 2017 entitled http://www.joyceportrait100.com.

Doctor Karen Wade, UCD School of English Drama and Film.

Karen Wade holds a BA in English and Linguistics and an MA in Gender and Writing, from University College Dublin. Her research interests include new media, digital literature, gender studies and autobiography. Her PhD project is currently titled “Gender and the Irish Blogging Community”, and examines how community and identity are constructed and performed in an explicitly Irish-identified online literary community. Areas of focus include the relevance of identity categories such as Irishness and gender to bloggers’ self-figurations, the construction of legitimacy and prestige within blogging communities, and issues of authenticity, performativity and fictionalisation pertaining to life-writing in a digital context.


Digital Resources


Note: The information contained in the links is derived from the ‘About’ sections of their project websites. As noted we will continue to build the resources on this site over the coming months.