Deer forests, game shooting and landed estates in the South West of Ireland, 1840 - 1970

This thesis is concentrated on the historical aspects of the elitist field sports of deer stalking and game shooting, as practiced by four Irish landed ascendancy families in the south west of Ireland. Four great estates were selected for study. Two of these were, by Irish standards, very large: the Kenmare estate of over 136,000 acres in the ownership of the Roman Catholic Earls of Kenmare, and the Herbert estate of over 44,000 acres in the ownership of the Protestant Herbert family. The other two were, in relative terms, small: the Grehan estate of c.7,500 acres in the ownership of the Roman Catholic Grehan family, and the Godfrey estate of c.5,000 acres, in the ownership of the Protestant Barons Godfrey. This mixture of contrasting estate size, owner's religions, nobleman, minor aristocrat and untitled gentry should, it is argued, yield a diversity of the field sports and lifestyles of their owners, and go some way to assess the contributions, good or bad, they have bequeathed to modern Ireland. Equally, it should help in assessing what importance, if any, applied to hunting. In this context, hunting is here used in its broadest meaning, and includes deer stalking and game shooting, as well as hunting with dogs and hounds on foot and horseback. Where a specific type of hunting is involved, it is so described; for example, fox hunting, stag hunting, hare hunting. Similarly, the term game is sometimes used in sporting literature to encompass all species of quarry killed, and can include deer, ground game (hares and rabbits), waterfowl, and various species of game birds. Where it refers to specific species, these are so described; for example grouse, pheasants, woodcork, wild duck, etc. Since two of these estates - the Kenmare and Herbert - each created a deer forest, unique in mid-19th century Ireland, they form the core study estates; the two smaller estates serve as comparative studies. And, equally unique, as these two larger estates held the only remnant population of native Irish red deer, the survival of that herd itself forms a concomitant core area of analysis. The numerary descriptions applied to these animals in popular literature are critically reassessed against prime source historical evidence, as are the so-called deer forest 'clearances'. The core period, 1840 to 1970, is selected as the seminal period, spanning 130 years, from the creation of the deer forests to when a fundamental change in policy and administration was introduced by the state. Comparison is made with similar estates elsewhere, in Britain and especially in Scotland. Their influence on the Irish methods and style of hunting is historically examined.

Representations of Catholicism in selected works by Colm Tóibín

The aim of this thesis is to provide an original and extensive study of Colm Tóibín as the “secular revisionist who acknowledges Catholicism as an enduring element of Irish society” (Ryan, Ireland and Scotland 251). Tóibín is uniquely placed to interpret many aspects of Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century and I will argue that intertwined with his revisionism of Irish history is a reimagining of Ireland and Catholicism in fictive terms. An extensive amount of material from Tóibín’s time as a journalist and travel writer will feature in my research because it validates my argument concerning his prolonged engagement with Catholicism. Similarly, a broad range of Tóibín’s prose will be studied because it affords opportunities for an exploration of a literary Catholic oeuvre in his fiction. Therefore, I am emphasizing that a crucial linkage of Catholicism is identifiable throughout Tóibín’s diverse canon of work. However, I will argue that divergences of attitude and mode can be found in how Tóibín depicts Catholicism in his journalism and fiction. My argument identifies Tóibín’s recurrent journalistic questioning of the Church’s teaching and leadership but I classify a benignity towards Catholicism in his travel writing and fiction. Overall, Tóibín’s fiction merits significant status in this thesis because of the representations of Catholicism in the work of a writer who has been short-listed three times for The Booker Prize.

Between the worlds: otherworld women as intermediaries in early Irish literature

This thesis examines the ways in which Otherworldly women acted as intermediaries between the Otherworld and mortal world in early Irish literature. First it establishes the position of women in early Ireland so that appropriate comparisons can be made between mortal and Otherworld women throughout the thesis. Also, it defines what is meant by the ‘Otherworld’ and its relevence to the early Irish. It then goes on to discuss the differing goals of various intermediaries in early Irish texts, and in what manner they interact with mortals. It briefly looks at how Otherworld male intermediaries are treated differently in the literature, and why early authors might have used women in these roles as often as they did.

Literatur verstehen und inszenieren: Foreign language literature through drama, a research project

Based on the experience that today's students find it more difficult than students of previous decades to relate to literature and appreciate its high cultural value, this paper argues that too little is known about the actual teaching and learning processes which take place in literature courses and that, in order to ensure the survival of literary studies in German curricula, future research needs to elucidate for students, the wider public and, most importantly, educational policy makers, why the study of literature should continue to have an important place in modern language curricula. Contending that students' willingness to engage with literature will, in the future, depend to a great extent on the use of imaginative methodology on the part of the teacher, we give a detailed account of an action research project carried out at University College Cork from October to December 2002 which set out to explore the potential of a drama in education approach to the teaching and learning of foreign language literature. We give concrete examples of how this approach works in practice, situate our approach within the subject debate surrounding Drama and the Language Arts and evaluate in detail the learning processes which are typical of performance-based literature learning. Based on converging evidence from different data sources and overall very positive feedback from students, we conclude by recommending that modern language departments introduce courses which offer a hands-on experience of literature that is different from that encountered in lectures and teacher-directed seminars.

Medieval Irish vision literature: a genre study

This dissertation examines medieval literary accounts of visions of the afterlife with an origin or provenance in Ireland from the perspective of genre, analysing their structural and literary characteristics both synchronically and diachronically. To this end, I have developed a new typology of medieval vision literature. I address the question in what manner the internationally attested genre of vision literature is adapted and developed in an Irish literary milieu. I explore this central research question through an interrogation of the typological unity of the key texts, both in formal arrangement and in the eschatological themes they express. My analysis of the structure and rhetoric of these narratives reveals the primary role of identity strategies, question-and-answer patterns and exhortation for their narrative cohesion and didactic function. In addition, I was able to make a formal distinction at text-level between the adaptation of the genre as an autonomous unit and the adaptation of thematic motifs as topoi. This further enabled me to nuance the distribution of characteristic features in the genre. My analysis of the spatial and temporal aspects of the eschatological journey confirms a preoccupation with personal eschatology. It reveals a close connection between the development of the aspects of graded access and trial in the genre and a growing awareness of an interim state of the soul after death. Finally, my dissertation provides new editions, translations and analyses of primary sources. My research breaks new ground in the hitherto underexplored area of genre adaptation in Ireland. In addition, it contributes significantly to our understanding of the nature of vision literature both in an Irish and a European context, and to our knowledge of the transmission of eschatological thought in the Latin West. Discusses the visions of: Laisrén, Fursa, Adomnán, Lóchán, Tnugdal, Owein and Visio Sancti Pauli Redactions VI and XI.

Problems with drawing lines: Theo-geographies of the Catholic parish in Ireland

While people in Catholic parishes in Ireland appear keenly aware of parish boundaries, these understandings are more often oral than cartographic. There is no digital map of all of the Catholic parishes in Ireland. However, the institutional Catholic Church insists that no square kilometre can exist outside of a parish boundary. In this paper, I explain a process whereby the Catholic parishes of Ireland were produced digitally. I will outline some of the technical challenges of digitizing such boundaries. In making these maps, it is not only a question of drawing lines but mapping people’s understanding of their locality. Through an example of one part of the digitisation project, I want to talk about how verifying maps with local people often complicates something which may have at first sight seemed simple. The paper ends on a comparison with how other communities of interest are territorialised in Ireland and elsewhere to draw out some broader theoretical and theological issues of concern.

Not published, not indexed: issues in generating and finding hospice and palliative care literature.

INTRODUCTION: Accessing new knowledge as the evidence base for hospice and palliative care grows has specific challenges for the discipline. This study aimed to describe conversion rates of palliative and hospice care conference abstracts to journal articles and to highlight that some palliative care literature may not be retrievable because it is not indexed on bibliographic databases. METHODS: Substudy A tracked the journal publication of conference abstracts selected for inclusion in a gray literature database on www.caresearch.com.au . Abstracts were included in the gray literature database following handsearching of proceedings of over 100 Australian conferences likely to have some hospice or palliative care content that were held between 1980 and 1999. Substudy B looked at indexing from first publication until 2001 of three international hospice and palliative care journals in four widely available bibliographic databases through systematic tracing of all original papers in the journals. RESULTS: Substudy A showed that for the 1338 abstracts identified only 15.9% were published (compared to an average in health of 45%). Published abstracts were found in 78 different journals. Multiauthor abstracts and oral presentations had higher rates of conversion. Substudy B demonstrated lag time between first publication and bibliographic indexing. Even after listing, idiosyncratic noninclusions were identified. DISCUSSION: There are limitations to retrieval of all possible literature through electronic searching of bibliographic databases. Encouraging publication in indexed journals of studies presented at conferences, promoting selection of palliative care journals for database indexing, and searching more than one bibliographic database will improve the accessibility of existing and new knowledge in hospice and palliative care.

Consistency of financial interest disclosures in the biomedical literature: the case of coronary stents.

BACKGROUND: Disclosure of authors' financial interests has been proposed as a strategy for protecting the integrity of the biomedical literature. We examined whether authors' financial interests were disclosed consistently in articles on coronary stents published in 2006. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We searched PubMed for English-language articles published in 2006 that provided evidence or guidance regarding the use of coronary artery stents. We recorded article characteristics, including information about authors' financial disclosures. The main outcome measures were the prevalence, nature, and consistency of financial disclosures. There were 746 articles, 2985 authors, and 135 journals in the database. Eighty-three percent of the articles did not contain disclosure statements for any author (including declarations of no interests). Only 6% of authors had an article with a disclosure statement. In comparisons between articles by the same author, the types of disagreement were as follows: no disclosure statements vs declarations of no interests (64%); specific disclosures vs no disclosure statements (34%); and specific disclosures vs declarations of no interests (2%). Among the 75 authors who disclosed at least 1 relationship with an organization, there were 2 cases (3%) in which the organization was disclosed in every article the author wrote. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: In the rare instances when financial interests were disclosed, they were not disclosed consistently, suggesting that there are problems with transparency in an area of the literature that has important implications for patient care. Our findings suggest that the inconsistencies we observed are due to both the policies of journals and the behavior of some authors.

IMPROMPTU: FROM PUBLISHER'S IMPULSE TO AN ESTABLISHED SMALL­ SCALE GENRE IN PIANO LITERATURE

The word 'impromptu' began to appear in music literature in the early 19th century, specifically as title for a relatively short composition written for solo piano. The first impromptus appear to have been named so by the publishers. However, the composers themselves soon embraced the title to indicate, for the most part, fairly short character pieces. Impromptus do not follow any specific structural pattern, although many are cast in ternary form. The formal design ranges from strict compound ternary in the early impromptus to through-composed and variation forms. The peak of impromptu's popularity undoubtedly came during the middle and late19th century. However, they are still being composed today, albeit much less frequently. Although there have been many variants of impromptus in relation to formal design and harmonic language over the years, the essence of impromptu remains the same: it is still a short character piece with a general feeling of spontaneity. Overall, impromptus may be categorized into several different groups: some appear as part of a larger cycle, such as Dvorak's G minor Impromptu from his Piano Pieces, B. 110; many others use an element of an additional genre that enhances the character ofthe impromptu, such as Liszt's Valse-Impromptu and Antonio Bibalo's Tango Impromptu; yet another group consists of works based on opera themes, such as Liszt's Impromptu Brillant sur des themes de Rossini et Spontini and Czerny's Impromptus et variations sur Oberon, Op. 134. My recording project includes well-known impromptus, such as Schubert's Op. 142 and the four by Chopin, as well as lesser known works that have not been performed or recorded often. There are four impromptus that have been recorded here for the first time, including those written by Leopold Godowsky, Antonio Bibalo, Altin Volaj, and Nikolay Mazhara. I personally requested the two last named composers to contribute impromptus to this project. My selection represents works by twenty composers and reflects the different types of impromptus that have been encountered through almost three hundred years of the genre's existence, from approximately 1817 (VoriSek) to 2008 (Volaj and Mazhara).

Evolutionary characters, phenotypes and ontologies: curating data from the systematic biology literature.

BACKGROUND: The wealth of phenotypic descriptions documented in the published articles, monographs, and dissertations of phylogenetic systematics is traditionally reported in a free-text format, and it is therefore largely inaccessible for linkage to biological databases for genetics, development, and phenotypes, and difficult to manage for large-scale integrative work. The Phenoscape project aims to represent these complex and detailed descriptions with rich and formal semantics that are amenable to computation and integration with phenotype data from other fields of biology. This entails reconceptualizing the traditional free-text characters into the computable Entity-Quality (EQ) formalism using ontologies. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We used ontologies and the EQ formalism to curate a collection of 47 phylogenetic studies on ostariophysan fishes (including catfishes, characins, minnows, knifefishes) and their relatives with the goal of integrating these complex phenotype descriptions with information from an existing model organism database (zebrafish, http://zfin.org). We developed a curation workflow for the collection of character, taxonomic and specimen data from these publications. A total of 4,617 phenotypic characters (10,512 states) for 3,449 taxa, primarily species, were curated into EQ formalism (for a total of 12,861 EQ statements) using anatomical and taxonomic terms from teleost-specific ontologies (Teleost Anatomy Ontology and Teleost Taxonomy Ontology) in combination with terms from a quality ontology (Phenotype and Trait Ontology). Standards and guidelines for consistently and accurately representing phenotypes were developed in response to the challenges that were evident from two annotation experiments and from feedback from curators. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The challenges we encountered and many of the curation standards and methods for improving consistency that we developed are generally applicable to any effort to represent phenotypes using ontologies. This is because an ontological representation of the detailed variations in phenotype, whether between mutant or wildtype, among individual humans, or across the diversity of species, requires a process by which a precise combination of terms from domain ontologies are selected and organized according to logical relations. The efficiencies that we have developed in this process will be useful for any attempt to annotate complex phenotypic descriptions using ontologies. We also discuss some ramifications of EQ representation for the domain of systematics.

REVOLUTIONARY VIOLIN LITERATURE IN THE TRANSFORMATIVE PERIOD OF THE 20TH CENTURY, 1900-1970

In satisfaction of requirements for a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, three recitals were given consisting of works of the early 21st Century European composers. The works performed on these recitals showcase a variety of compositional styles that explore different qualities of the violin. The purpose of this project was to demonstrate how the war and conflict in Europe and attendant radical cultural and social developments affected these composers. The first recital program includes: Sonata for Violin and Cello and Piece en Forme de Habanera by Maurice Ravel; Op. 30 Mythesfor Violin and Piano by Karol Szymanowski; Concertina for Violin and Piano and Sonata No.2 for Violin Solo by Grazyna Bacewicz. The second recital program consists of: Sonata for Violin and Piano by Leos Janacek; Quartet for the End of Time: movement VIII "Louange a l'Immortalite de Jesus" by Oliver Messiaen; Sonata for Solo Violin by Erwin Schulhoff; and Passacaglia & Fuga for String Trio by Hans Krasa. The third recital highlights the works of Russian composers: Sonata for Violin and Piano Op.134 by Dmitri Shostakovich; and Violin Sonata No.2 in D major Op. 94 by Sergei Prokofiev. These composers represent individual, distinct and fascinating adaptation to events beyond their control as well as their power of transformation. The first recital was performed in collaboration with Hsiang-Ling Hsiao on piano and Gozde Yasar on cello. The second recital was given with Hsiang-Ling Hsiao on piano, Gozde Yasar on cello, and Asli Gultekin Ozek on viola. The third recital was performed with David Ballena on piano. The recitals were recorded on compact discs and are archived within the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM).

Post-1945 Danish Piano Trio Literature: A Recording Dissertation

This recording dissertation surveys post-1945 literature written for piano trio (violin, violoncello and piano) by ten Danish composers. The literature was first considered for inclusion by searching a database provided by the Danish Music Information Center (www.mic.dk). Scores were rented from the publisher Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS, or purchased from the publisher Samfundet til Udgivelse af Dansk Musik. An additional score published by Viking Musikforlag was used as well. The music was then studied and evaluated for selection. During the selection process, the following criteria were considered: 1) quality of the compositions; 2) recognition of the composers at the national or international level; 3) whether the compositions had been previously recorded; and 4) variety of compositional styles. The selected works are written by Niels Viggo Bentzon, Vagn Holmboe, Anders Koppel, Herman D. Koppel, Bent Lorentzen, Anders Nordentoft, Per Norgard, Michael Nyvang, Karl Aage Rasmussen, and Poul Rovsing Olsen. The selected compositions were practiced, rehearsed, and performed under direct supervision of the composers and other expert musicians. In order to better understand the compositional style of each composer, relevant books, articles, and recordings were researched and studied. This recording dissertation is supported by a written document. A subjective preference for program balance was exercised to determine the order of recorded works. The written document is divided into chapters defined by composer, following the order of the recorded document, which include the composers' biographies and notes referring to the recorded compositions. The recording took place at the Manzius Gaarden, Birkerod, Denmark during three sessions: July 31-August 2, 2002, March 2 and 3, 2003, and June 2-4, 2003. The music for this dissertation was recorded by the members of the Jalina Trio; Line Fredens, violin, Janne Fredens, cello and Natsuki Fukasawa, piano. Aksel Trige, a well-respected recording engineer, was engaged for the recording and editing. Additionally, a Hamburg Steinway concert grand piano was rented and a Joseph Guarnerius filius Andreas Cremona violin (1706) was provided by the Augustinus Fonden, Denmark. The cellist used her own instrument, Vuillaume of Paris (c. 1850). The expense of this recording was partially paid by generous grants from the Augustinus Fonden, the Solist Foreningen af 1921, and the Dansk Musikerforbunds Kollective Rettighedsmidler. The compositions selected for this recording dissertation are assumed to be previously unrecorded, with the exception of Poul Rovsing Olsen's Trio II.

Muscle Logic: New Knowledge Resource for Anatomy Enables Comprehensive Searches of the Literature on the Feeding Muscles of Mammals.

BACKGROUND: In recent years large bibliographic databases have made much of the published literature of biology available for searches. However, the capabilities of the search engines integrated into these databases for text-based bibliographic searches are limited. To enable searches that deliver the results expected by comparative anatomists, an underlying logical structure known as an ontology is required. DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING OF THE ONTOLOGY: Here we present the Mammalian Feeding Muscle Ontology (MFMO), a multi-species ontology focused on anatomical structures that participate in feeding and other oral/pharyngeal behaviors. A unique feature of the MFMO is that a simple, computable, definition of each muscle, which includes its attachments and innervation, is true across mammals. This construction mirrors the logical foundation of comparative anatomy and permits searches using language familiar to biologists. Further, it provides a template for muscles that will be useful in extending any anatomy ontology. The MFMO is developed to support the Feeding Experiments End-User Database Project (FEED, https://feedexp.org/), a publicly-available, online repository for physiological data collected from in vivo studies of feeding (e.g., mastication, biting, swallowing) in mammals. Currently the MFMO is integrated into FEED and also into two literature-specific implementations of Textpresso, a text-mining system that facilitates powerful searches of a corpus of scientific publications. We evaluate the MFMO by asking questions that test the ability of the ontology to return appropriate answers (competency questions). We compare the results of queries of the MFMO to results from similar searches in PubMed and Google Scholar. RESULTS AND SIGNIFICANCE: Our tests demonstrate that the MFMO is competent to answer queries formed in the common language of comparative anatomy, but PubMed and Google Scholar are not. Overall, our results show that by incorporating anatomical ontologies into searches, an expanded and anatomically comprehensive set of results can be obtained. The broader scientific and publishing communities should consider taking up the challenge of semantically enabled search capabilities.

Developing Quantitative Methodologies for the Digital Humanities: A Case Study of 20th Century American Commentary on Russian Literature

Using scientific methods in the humanities is at the forefront of objective literary analysis. However, processing big data is particularly complex when the subject matter is qualitative rather than numerical. Large volumes of text require specialized tools to produce quantifiable data from ideas and sentiments. Our team researched the extent to which tools such as Weka and MALLET can test hypotheses about qualitative information. We examined the claim that literary commentary exists within political environments and used US periodical articles concerning Russian literature in the early twentieth century as a case study. These tools generated useful quantitative data that allowed us to run stepwise binary logistic regressions. These statistical tests allowed for time series experiments using sea change and emergency models of history, as well as classification experiments with regard to author characteristics, social issues, and sentiment expressed. Both types of experiments supported our claim with varying degrees, but more importantly served as a definitive demonstration that digitally enhanced quantitative forms of analysis can apply to qualitative data. Our findings set the foundation for further experiments in the emerging field of digital humanities.