As I live in Australia and research medieval and early
modern Irish history, the Research Trip always looms large in the way I think
about researching and writing.
I have just returned from a month in Dublin, a precious
month away from domestic and teaching responsibilities where I could read and
write to my own timetable as well as catch up with friends and colleagues. In
the three years since my last Research Trip a lot has changed. I have changed
jobs and am now lecturing in European History at Victoria University,
Melbourne, which I love. It also means I have the security (and travel funds)
to plan my research more than I had been able in the previous few years. So for
the past year I have been compiling long lists under the title “To check in
Dublin”, working out flights, accommodation, conferences and seminars to
attend.
Dublin, and Ireland, has also changed. When I was last in
Dublin the crash of the Celtic Tiger was starting to be felt. This time the
effects are even more evident. Reduced staff at libraries, shops with less
stock, gloomy news about taxes as well as ghost estates and unfinished
buildings, were all very visible.
The process of researching in the project that took me to Dublin
– “Gender and violence in medieval and early modern Ireland” – is also changing
through the availability of digital resources. The digital publication of the
1641 depositions (http://1641.tcd.ie), the
Circle project (http://chancery.tcd.ie/),
Irish Scripts Online (http://www.isos.dias.ie/), google books,
JStor Ireland, and State Papers Online as well as others mean that so much of
what I used to do on research trips I can now do from my desk in Melbourne. This
is of course wonderful and I want to write more about this in a later blog. However
for me there is also the joy of being able to write in a library where I can
follow footnotes and ideas to hard copy published and unpublished sources
immediately, as there is still a huge proportion of what I want to examine that
has not been digitalised, or is difficult to read online (not all the book
digitalisations are in easy to access formats). While I can access a large amount
of this material in Melbourne, there are still items that are not easily
available here or that need inter-library loans or travel to other university
libraries. So I enjoy the luxury of having what I need under one roof – thanks
National Library of Ireland! I also continue to revel in the tactile and
sensory nature of the artefact of the book or manuscript. For me this is a big
part of how I research and gather the energy and inspiration needed to analyse
and write.
Networking too is changing, ‘meeting’ people working on
related topics through twitter and academia.edu is wonderful and incredibly
productive, but still, for me at least, does not totally replace meeting face
to face. Going to conferences remains
important– this time I went to the Irish Conference of Historians at UCD, a
really good conference – and meeting researchers working on related and
unrelated topics is another pleasure, as well as necessity for researching
topics at a distance.
So now I am back in wintery Melbourne with all my files and
notes, ready to start the final write up for this project and begin another (on
concepts of race and Irishness in nineteenth-century Australia). As well as the
familiar continuities of working through research notes and writing, I will
also change a little of the way I work and start this blog to share findings
and insights I find through the process of finishing, starting and continuing.
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