On 8 November 2023, the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics celebrated the edited collection Technology in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2023) with an event at MoLI. The editors, Professor Margaret Kelleher (UCD) and Dr James O’Sullivan (UCC), and contributors reflected on the motivations for the collection, as well as the possible future impact technology will make on cultural production, and Dr Kathryn Conrad (University of Kansas) presented a keynote: '“Haunted by a sewing machine”: Technology and the Politics of Text Style from Yeats to ChatGPT'.
In this video, a panel comprising Professor Claire Lynch (Brunel University London), Dr Anne Karhio (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences), Dr Karen Wade (UCD), Professor Margaret Kelleher (UCD) and Professor Gerardine Meaney (UCD) discusses the publication, continuing here with reflections from Professor Claire Lynch.
Technology in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2023) shows how such significant technologies – typewriters, gramophones, print, radio, television, computers – have influenced Irish literary practices and cultural production, while also examining how technology has been embraced as a theme in Irish writing. Once a largely rural and agrarian society, contemporary Ireland has embraced the communicative, performative, and consumption habits of a culture utterly reliant on the digital. This text plumbs the origins of the present moment, examining the longer history of literature’s interactions with the technological and exploring how the transformative capacity of modern technology has been mediated throughout a diverse national canon. Comprising essays from some of the major figures of Irish literary and cultural studies, this volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive account of how Irish literature and culture have interacted with technology.
