A silent witness? Medieval urban landscapes and unfolding their mapping histories

This paper offers a critical reflection on the place of maps in writing medieval urban histories. Using findings from recent research on medieval Swansea, the case is made that mapping provides an interpretative space for exploring alternative narratives about past places. To do so the paper draws upon current critical debates on cartography, particularly the idea that mapping is fluid and iterative, to suggest that Swansea's medieval urban origins are open to a range of alternative interpretations. This approach to mapping differs from that often used by historians to map medieval urban landscapes, where historic maps are simply used as ‘sources’, and the landscapes they represent used as ‘witnesses’ to past events, for creating maps, both through digital and analogue media, instead opens up – or unfolds – a landscape's past. The paper uses past attempts to map medieval Swansea to highlight difficulties in interpreting its urban landscape features, and uses multiple mappings of the medieval townscape, resulting from recent research, to question how far any sources about the past really provide a coherent narrative. Instead, multiple mappings of the medieval urban landscape – reflecting different and competing perspectives – are more attuned with how places were perceived and understood during the Middle Ages.

A Cambridge History of Irish Working-Class Writing

This 24-chapter edited collection will be the first major study of the history of Irish working-class writing.

Public Sector Reforms: Changing Contours on an NPM Landscape

Previous studies suggest that public-sector accounting has moved from Public Administration (PA) to New Public Management (NPM) ideas and, more recently, towards a New Public Governance (NPG) approach. These systems are presented as mutually exclusive and competing. Focusing on accounting changes in the UK central government, this paper explores whether movements towards NPG ideas can be identified at the level of political debate. No evidence is found that NPM is a transitory state. Rather, the findings demonstrate that political debate continues to utilise predominantly NPM arguments, with the three systems viewed as containing complementary, rather than competing, schemes.

Atlas of European Historiography: The Making of a Profession, 1800-2005 (Writing the Nation)

The collection of the data for this volume formed part of the work of the European Science Foundation project on Writing National Histories. I was a member of the Research Team (1) which produced the volume. I also wrote two contributions for the Atlas. I collected the data and wrote the section on academic historians in Ireland. I also wrote a synthesis of the data on academic women historians in Europe, 1815-2005.

Content Validity in Landscape Valuation: A transdisciplinary approach to valuing the landscape of the peninsula of Sorrento, Italy.

This paper addresses the representation of landscape complexity in stated preferences research. It integrates landscape ecology and landscape economics and conducts the landscape analysis in a three-dimensional space to provide ecologically meaningful quantitative landscape indicators that are used as variables for the monetary valuation of landscape in a stated preferences study. Expected heterogeneity in taste intensity across respondents is addressed with a mixed logit model in Willingness to Pay space. The results suggest that the integration of landscape ecology metrics in a stated preferences model provides useful insights for valuing landscape and landscape changes

Spatio-temporal feeding selection of red deer in a mountainous landscape

Understanding the dietary consumption and selection of wild populations of generalist herbivores is hampered by the complex array of factors. Here, we determine the influence of habitat, season, and animal density, sex, and age on the diet consumption and selection of 426 red deer (Cervus elaphus scoticus) culled in Fiordland National Park, New Zealand. Our site differs from studies elsewhere both in habitat (evergreen angiosperm-dominated forests) and the intensity of hunting pressures. We predicted that deer would not consume forage in proportion to its relative availability, and that dietary consumption would change among and within years in response to hunting pressures that would also limit opportunities for age and sex segregation. Using canonical correspondence analysis, we evaluated the relative importance of different drivers of variation in diet consumption assessed from gut content and related these to available forage in the environment. We found that altitude explained the largest proportion of variation in diet consumption, reflecting the ability of deer to alter their consumption and selection in relation to their foraging grounds. Grasses formed a high proportion of the diet consumption, even for deer culled several kilometres from the alpine grasslands. In the winter months, when the alpine grasslands were largely inaccessible, less grass was eaten and deer resorted to woody plants that were avoided in the summer months. Surprisingly, there were no significant dietary differences between adults and juveniles and only subtle differences between the sexes. Sex-based differences in diet consumption are commonly observed in ungulate species and we suggest that they may have been reduced in our study area owing to decreased heterogeneity in available forage as the diversity of palatable species decreased under high deer browsing pressures, or by intense hunting pressure. © 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2009 Ecological Society of Australia.