A sponsored supplement created by Times Higher Education magazine for Trinity College Dublin to a brief agreed with TCD. Published on 9 September 2010. Editorial content commissioned by TSL Education Ltd. Supplement paid for by Trinity Long Room Hub through private funding.

1. Produced by Times Higher Education for Trinity College Dublin
Arts and Humanities
enter a new phaseNew perspectives

2. he newest building on the Trinity College Dublin campus captured the
imagination of its residents while it was still on the drawing board. Those
involved with the project admit to being captivated by its potential, by its
ability to “throw away the rulebook” and by the buzz it generates that “never
really goes away”.
Whether this enthusiasm comes from within Trinity College Dublin itself – which as
a walled campus around which the city of Dublin grew has its own individual dynamic,
or whether it comes from a rare focus on disciplines that are often passed over for
investment opportunities in more technological subjects – it is clear that the Trinity Long
Room Hub is a unique place.
It is attracting interest from all over the campus from disciplines as diverse as physics,
genetics and IT, as their experts team up with arts and humanities scholars to collaborate
on interdisciplinary work ranging from the study of historical documents such as the Book
of Kells to a project capturing memories from the Republic of Ireland’s older population.
Conceived in 2004 as a research institute for the arts and humanities at Trinity, the
Hub was formally established as a Trinity Research Institute in 2006 and one year later
secured €10.8 million (£8.87 million) in funding from the Irish government as part of
the Humanities Serving Irish Society consortium bid to the Higher Education Authority’s
Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions. The Hub combines the strengths
of a great research library facility, such as The Huntington in California, and an institute
for advanced studies, such as Harvard University’s Radcliffe.
But describing exactly what the Hub is, however, is difficult, as it is more than a building:
it is a node and an incubator; it is where ideas intersect. Poul Holm, academic director
of the Trinity Long Room Hub, describes it best: “It’s not an ivory tower, but a powerhouse.”
Describing what it does is easier: it promotes outreach and access to the general public,
to policymakers and to schools while interacting with the creative and IT industries, the
world of cultural heritage and the media.
As Holm says: “We’re definitely not building the Hub to ringfence the humanities,
but to open up and to be sure that we are developing a platform or springboard for humanities
research, both to engage with other academic disciplines and to engage with society to
deliver on some of the major societal challenges.”
The Trinity Long Room Hub encompasses activities from within seven academic
schools – Drama, Film and Music; English; Histories and Humanities; Languages,
Literatures and Cultural Studies; Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences;
Religions, Theology and Ecumenics; and Social Sciences and Philosophy – as well as
the Library. Alongside these sit world-class facilities including offices for nine visiting
researchers, an open reading room with carrel-style workspaces for 45 postdoctoral and
postgraduate researchers, a lecture theatre, a seminar room, an ideas space and a
Digitisation Unit suite.
Before it officially opens its doors, the Hub is already pulling in funding. The Irish
government recently granted the Digital Arts and Humanities Consortium, which the Hub
is leading, nearly €7 million in funding. Of this, €3 million will go to the Digital Arts
and Humanities Structured PhD programme at Trinity, with the money supporting
studentships, academic positions and administrative and technical support staff.
According to Holm, “This will potentially have a huge impact on European thinking
about the arts and humanities as a job creator and as potentially providing totally new
ways of doing research in the arts and humanities.”
The buzz around the arts and humanities in Trinity looks set to spread further afield.
T
9 September 2010 Times Higher Education 3
ou could be forgiven for thinking that innovation is the domain of science,
engineering and technology. But you would be wrong. Building on almost 420
years of scholarly tradition, Trinity College Dublin is advancing a new phase
of evolution in research for the arts and humanities. With the completion of
the Trinity Long Room Hub, a dedicated institute for advanced studies in the arts and
humanities, Trinity is positioning high technology alongside high thinking. The juxtaposition
of this research facility with the college’s 280-year-old library is deliberate. Linking the
old with the new, Trinity is drawing on the past to inform the future, creating new
scholarship and consolidating existing fields of enquiry through the innovative use of digital
technologies. As the world grapples with recession, Trinity’s Long Room Hub is a beacon,
harking back to the ancient role of the university in society, to focus minds and to
illuminate through questioning the human condition.
In a time of financial restraint, the Irish government has invested €10.8 million in the
arts and humanities via funding for the Trinity Long Room Hub. The innovative work going
on there has begun to change people’s views of the impact that the arts and humanities
can have on business. Pioneering projects are shaping a “smarter planet”. Although the
word “computer” preceded the collection of the 1641 Depositions by almost 30 years,
only in this century are the two coming together. Using witness statements made after an
Irish rebellion some three and a half centuries ago to teach today’s IBM computers how
to understand language is just one way the arts and humanities are helping a multinational
corporation to innovate. IBM says it is the different insights that come from the humanities
that it particularly values.
But is investment and research in the arts and humanities truly sustainable? The evolution
of digital humanities offers hope that research in these disciplines will flourish, despite
the disparity in funding with science. But institutions must move quickly to embrace this
change and foster relationships with industry. The groundbreaking work being undertaken
at the Trinity Long Room Hub points to a future in which arts and humanities research
can be as rewarding to a nation’s bottom line as it is to the pursuit of knowledge.
Contents
4
The porous university
Ireland’s oldest university facilitates
collaboration between scholars and business
8
Force field
The new Trinity Long Room Hub
building is launched
10
Back to the future
A digitally driven setting for arts research
shows yesterday’s importance to tomorrow
12
Home and away
Strengthening links with the city of Dublin
and the global community of scholars
14
Creative network
Making arts and humanities research
sustainable
Editor of Times Higher Education: Ann Mroz Supplement Editor: Fiona Salvage
Produced by TSL Education Limited to a brief agreed with Trinity College Dublin.
Paid for by the Trinity Long Room Hub through private funding. All editorial content
commissioned by TSL Education Limited.
For feedback or to suggest ideas for supplements, contact fiona.salvage@tsleducation.com
For sponsorship or advertising opportunities, contact matthew.clancy@tsleducation.com
To view this supplement as a digital edition, go to www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/tcd
Y
2 Times Higher Education 9 September 2010

3. 9 September 2010 Times Higher Education 5
or many years, Ireland’s oldest
third-level institution has been
finding novel and dynamic ways
to engage with the world, but the
latest example is its most significant to date. The
Trinity Long Room Hub, the university’s new
arts and humanities research institute, repre-
sents a promising synergy between arts and
humanities and several globally significant in-
dustrial partners that, at first glance, looks
improbable. In development for the past seven
years, it was grant-aided €10.8 million (£8.87 mil-
lion) by the Irish government, enabling Trinity
College to erect a new building to house the
project.
The impetus to create the Trinity Long Room
Hub (which got its name from the famous Long
Room housed within the university’s old library)
came from the realisation that research in arts
and humanities is “far too fragmented”, says
Jane Ohlmeyer, Erasmus Smith’s professor of
modern history at Trinity College, and one of the
Trinity Long Room Hub’s founders.
Trinity College has a well-established aca-
demic reputation and outstanding library
resources (see box, page 7). “However, we realised
we were not making as much as we could of
these phenomenal assets,” Ohlmeyer says.
It used to be the case that only faculties such
as pharmacy, science and engineering would link
up with major multinationals on groundbreaking
research collaborations, or have any real impact
on the economy in terms of providing new jobs.
The porous
university
But that is changing. Now Ireland’s rich diversi-
ty of government-supported research and
development projects is being carried out by many
of the world’s leading corporations with a sig-
nificant presence in Ireland, in partnership with
arts and humanities disciplines at Trinity College.
The objective of the Trinity Long Room Hub
is to bring together an eclectic group of disci-
plines to work on new and exciting projects. One
of those projects, the 1641 Depositions, is a
pioneering partnership with IBM, the univer-
sities of Aberdeen and Cambridge, the Arts
and Humanities Research Council, the Irish
Research Council for the Humanities and
based on history? Marie Wallace, senior research
and development manager at IBM Language-
Ware, explains that the complex, unstructured and
very challenging data contained in the project will
help IBM to teach computers how to understand
natural language. IBM LanguageWare, innova-
tive new software that the company is currently
developing, will be able to summarise, correlate
and analyse vast quantities of information.
The critical-analysis skills for which aca-
demics in the arts and humanities are well known
will be available with IBM’s new, highly focused
software. It will be relevant to a broad range of
people carrying out research, who will be able
to “ask” the software questions about a specific
body of knowledge, and it will extrapolate con-
clusions and provide all the necessary answers.
It will remove the need to read endless pages
of documents – and it will all be available on the
internet. The project is part of IBM’s vision of a
“smarter planet”, and its objective to develop soft-
ware that will be of value to millions in their
everyday lives.
Wallace says working with the humanities is
exciting for IBM because “we get a completely
different perspective and insights that we can
apply in different areas to create entirely new
products. We can make parallels and apply what
we learn from the 1641 project to areas as diverse
as law enforcement and financial services.”
Yet another groundbreaking Trinity Long
Room Hub project is happening in partnership
with Microsoft, and it involves creating a
Ireland’s oldest university unveils an
innovative way to unite scholarship and
business. Eddie Lennon reports
‘Working with Trinity College
Dublin’s arts and humanities
is exciting for IBM – we get a
completely different
perspective’
Social Sciences and Trinity College Library.
A major rebellion erupted in Ireland in 1641
that resulted in a considerable loss of life. Many
people were murdered by the insurgents and in
reprisal killings by government forces. Others
were expelled from their homes in the middle of
winteranddiedfromcoldordisease.TheIrishgov-
ernment of the time took several thousand witness
statements from mainly Protestant settlers about
their experiences of the rebellion. These state-
ments, which are kept in Trinity College Dublin’s
library,runto19,000pagesbutaredifficulttoread.
So why is IBM getting involved in a project
The past speaks a groundbreaking partnership with IBM employs written records of a 17th-century rebellion to aid in software development
F
4 Times Higher Education 9 September 2010
1641DEPOSITIONSCOURTESYOFTHEBOARDOFTRINITYCOLLEGEDUBLIN
Ohlmeyer ‘research is far too fragmented’

4. 9 September 2010 Times Higher Education 7
virtual research environment for humanities
scholars.
“We have all these electronic resources on
the web: some commercial, some freely avail-
able. But they’re digital ghettos – they don’t
talk to each other very well. With a lot of the
searching that goes on, only a small amount of
material is being searched,” Ohlmeyer says.
“What we’re doing with Microsoft is creat-
ing a network where all these digital ghettos work
together. We’re collecting manuscript sources and
other primary and textual visual documenta-
tion into a virtual room, along with all the relevant
published material available on the web. The aim
is to bring information together in a seamless,
interoperable way.”
This innovative project in the world of arts
and humanities is likely to be of major interest
to historians, genealogists, academics and stu-
dents. Like IBM’s 1641 initiative, it will make
life a lot easier for those who use it, and will save
a lot of time, Ohlmeyer says.
Extending this research technology would
be of obvious commercial value to Microsoft. Uni-
versities everywhere that teach humanities would
conceivably be interested in subscribing to it, as
would public libraries. And, Ohlmeyer adds:
“Once it is developed it should be very easy to
customise for specific purposes.”
Although the service could be subscription
based, it is expected to be available free of charge
to researchers in local and national libraries.
6 Times Higher Education 9 September 2010
of the School of Drama, Film and Music. He has
been involved with the Trinity Long Room Hub
in the development of a proposed new doctorate
in digital arts and humanities, for which a con-
sortium of Irish universities has recently secured
substantial funding from the Irish government as
part of Ireland’s smart economy.
Along with Microsoft and IBM, Google and In-
tel have signed on as industrial partners to the
new PhD programme.
These four companies will work in tandem with
Trinity College’s PhD students on new and cut-
ting-edge research projects. These will range
from human-computer interfaces (similar to the
technology used in the Wii game console) to new
forms of interactive performance, ranging from
cinema to live events.
Dublin is clearly a city rich in the arts and hu-
manities. From its various theatres and lively
music scene to the Oscar Wilde Centre for Writ-
ing, it offers a wealth of information and learning
for all practitioners. But this knowledge was not,
until recently, being shared as well as it could
be. A recent report by Trinity College academic
Johanna Archbold, Creativity, the City and the
Terry Neill is a governor of
London Business School and
co-chair of the external
advisory board of the Trinity
Long Room Hub. “Within the
arts and humanities,” he says,
“there’s an extraordinary body
of knowledge about human
beings – how they behave,
how they learn, what
motivates or de-motivates
them, their values, and what
you can learn from their
history – but most of the time
only a tiny fraction of it is
applied in business,
government and society. It is
somehow trapped in the halls
of academia. There is an
extraordinary challenge – and
opportunity – to engage and
bring that knowledge and
insight to the wider world.”
One person doing just that
is Maurice Biriotti, who was
recently appointed adjunct
professor of humanities innovation
at Trinity College Dublin. Biriotti’s
new role with the Trinity Long
Room Hub will be to forge
relationships between the arts,
humanities and business, and
to find new ideas and innovations
for Trinity College. He will also
be responsible for identifying
and creating new research
projects and spin-offs. “The
best companies deserve the
best thinking,” he says.
Biriotti’s background is as a
lecturer in the humanities, mainly
in literature. He left the academy
with a determination to harness
the wisdom and insights he found
in the arts and humanities to help
solve contemporary problems. He
is chief executive of the agency
SHM, which assists companies to
answer awkward questions and
solve thorny problems during
times of crisis and change.
Its work is wide-ranging, from
helping companies to transform
their finance functions to aiding
government organisations to
create the right set of values to
live by. In recent years, Biriotti has
employed philosophers, historians
and literary critics in various
universities across Europe to help
shed light on a variety of business
problems.
He says: “The arts and
philosophy helped Biriotti to
advise companies how to
manage relationships between
several cultures in circumstances
where work had been
outsourced to companies
abroad.
He explains: “Some of
Aristotle’s insights helped us
reconceptualise these
relationships. When we examined
them through the lens of
Aristotle, we found that a lot of
outsourcing relationships begin
with people being attracted to
each other because they’re
different (quicker at doing a
particular function, for example).
But the minute the ink is dry on a
Aristotle’s lessons for outsourcing and Zola’stips for corporate networking
‘With Microsoft we’re
creating a network to help
digital ghettos work together,
to bring data together in a
seamless way’
contract, it seems that the very
thing that attracted people to their
partner often becomes the thing
that repels them.
An obscure novel called Au
Bonheur des Dames, by the French
writer Émile Zola, was the rather
unlikely basis for figuring out what
exactly was going on. Zola’s novel
features a portrayal of the early
days of department stores. It
illustrates how gossip among staff,
far from being a mere distraction
from work, is what makes a
department store run smoothly.
Biriotti says: “We realised the
experts weren’t communicating
because, given the way their lives
and professions were set up, they
humanities touch on all the
biggest things that affect us in life:
why we do what we do, what we
believe in, what the right and
wrong thing to do is. What keeps
people who work in business,
politics and policymaking up at
night has nothing to do with
spreadsheets, numbers or
technical stuff. We in humanities
are sitting on this amazing
treasure trove – operas and plays,
sonnets and poetry, philosophy
and history. It is the humanities’
best effort at working through
what could be the best way to
think about a whole variety of big
questions.”
Strange as it may sound, Greek
were devoid of any proper
human contact. When we
introduced human contact into
the intranet – simply by asking
people to create chat rooms, and
the kind of social networking we
would see years later on the
likes of Facebook – usage rates,
and communication generally,
went through the roof.”
Meanwhile, Neill believes
the arts and humanities contain
a rich vein of knowledge that is
not merely useful in its
applicability to the business
world. That applicability, he
predicts, may also yet bring a
much-needed boost to Ireland’s
economy.
University, was published as part of the Trinity
Week 2010 festival. In the document, Archbold
highlights eight cultural institutions – the ma-
jority of which are based within a square kilometre
in the city centre in a “cultural cluster” – offer-
ing new and exciting opportunities for synergies
with each other, with many significant opportu-
nities for collaboration that have yet to be
explored.
Between them, the institutions hold priceless
collections consisting of millions of manuscripts,
artefacts and paintings, treasures of historical rel-
evance to Ireland and abroad, and each hosts
public programmes encouraging interaction with
these treasures.
At the launch of the report, Trinity College
provost John Hegarty said: “The rationale for
the Creativity, the City and the University
report was that Trinity College together with
Dublin’s major cultural institutions could com-
bine their efforts further and enable progress to
the forefront of creativity and innovation in the
cultural sector. The challenge now is to exploit
even more the connections and to learn from
international experience in this regard.”
Trinity College Dublin’s arts
and humanities faculty boasts
some world-famous alumni.
Some of the most well known
include playwrights Samuel
Beckett and Oscar Wilde; Bram
Stoker, author of Dracula;
Jonathan Swift, author of
Gulliver’s Travels; and
philosophers George Berkeley
and Edmund Burke.
The university has a strong
academic reputation and
outstanding library resources,
including volumes dating back to
1592, when the university was
founded. Its legal deposit
library receives a copy of every
book published in the UK and
Ireland every year.
Trinity College’s position as a
world leader in arts and
humanities research and
thinking is well established.
It was ranked 41st in the
world for arts and humanities in
the Times Higher Education
World University Rankings 2009,
and is 12th in Europe – which
sees it placed higher than any
other Irish higher education
institution.
“Microsoft Research collaborates with the
world’s foremost researchers in academia, across
industries and governments, to advance research
and fuel innovation. Our collaboration with
the Trinity Long Room Hub is just one of the many
ways we are integrating with leading academic
institutions worldwide to further innovation,”
Alex Wade, director for scholarly communication,
Microsoft External Research, says.
Matthew Causey is senior lecturer in drama
at Trinity College Dublin. He is also director of
the Arts Technology Research Lab, which is part
Neill ‘knowledge trapped in
the halls of academia’

5. 9 September 2010 Times Higher Education 98 Times Higher Education 9 September 2010
Force field
TheTrinity Long Room Hub will galvanise
humanities scholarship.Fiona Salvage reports
he speed at which the Trinity Long
Room Hub building has been
erected reflects the energy asso-
ciated with the whole project.
Constructed in less than a year, the new
building is a visual embodiment of many years
of dynamic work in the arts and humanities at
Trinity College Dublin.
Poul Holm, academic director of the Trinity
Long Room Hub, says: “I think it will be a sig-
nature building, not just for Trinity but also for
the arts and humanities. The building certainly
provides the focus within Trinity; it is in a very
prominent position on the campus. We have an
outstanding opportunity to open our doors – not
only to be a hub for Trinity researchers, but also
to build a network of people in culture, in liter-
ary and artistic life in Dublin and beyond, and
provide a nexus for energising the field.”
The excitement surrounding the Hub is about
more than just the physical building; it is also
about the activities that will take place within
it, and the people who will meet there to col-
laborate, research, innovate, discuss and promote
the arts and humanities to a wider world.
One of the most distinctive parts of the Hub
is the library, says librarian and college archivist
Robin Adams, because “there is a recognition
that the library is an active partner in the re-
search process, particularly as we’re moving
more into digital and electronic environments.
“We – librarians, archivists – can bring more
to the process because once we change the for-
mat of the material there are issues of how it
is described, the whole concept of metadata
creation, how you access material and how you
remodel it.”
One of the attractions for researchers will
be access to the growing number of Trinity Col-
lege treasures being digitised. Overseen by Tim
Keefe, head of digital resources and imaging
services, digitised versions of an expanding cat-
alogue of the institution’s priceless artefacts are
available online, which is driving up numbers of
visiting researchers keen to study the real thing.
Holm believes researchers in the arts and
humanities have lacked a supportive infra-
structure to help them work with industry as
extensively and successfully as their colleagues
in science and medical fields. One of the Hub’s
roles will be to act as an incubator: to foster net-
works, leadership and entrepreneurship and
support researchers to identify the partners they
need to take their research further and wider.
This advocacy role is vital, because “very few
people speak up for the arts and humanities”,
Holm says, especially at the high-powered
tables where far-reaching decisions are made, and
where too often the arts and humanities are treat-
ed as the “ethical appendix”.
Work being undertaken at Trinity College in
medical humanities, environmental humanities
and in new fields such as arts technology, demon-
strate the diverse and non-traditional areas the
humanities are beginning to move into and should
be consulted in, Holm says.
“The arts and humanities are a key to success
in the global marketplace. Conventional wisdom
is that technology and scientific discoveries are
the main drivers of modern societies. Those
working in the arts and humanities see things dif-
ferently – we as humans are driven not by what
we eat but what we want to eat. The thought, the
intention is primary to human action. The arts
and humanities deal with the most driving force
of all: motivation.”
T
Keefe digitisation is key
Holm ‘the building provides the focus within Trinity’

6. 9 September 2010 Times Higher Education 1110 Times Higher Education 9 September 2010
Back to
the future
A cutting-edge,digitally driven setting for arts and
humanities research shows the importance of
yesterday to tomorrow,writes Maeve O’Lynn
t is widely acknowledged that the
arts and humanities do not tend to
produce the same sort of quantifi-
able results as medical,
engineering or economic research, for example.
Instead, research and study in the field of arts
and humanities is often focused on centuries
past, whether the subject in question is litera-
ture, paintings, languages, sources, historical
events, documents or archives. But the question
remains as to whether this focus on the past can
have relevance for the present and whether it
is, in fact, a necessity in order to prepare for the
future.
H.G. Wells said: “History is a race between
education and catastrophe.” However, in the
case of the arts and humanities disciplines,
this is a race that catastrophe threatens to
win, as government education policy continues
to value science and business, while treating
the traditionally revered arts and humanities
disciplines as less relevant and meaningful
to today’s student and in today’s society.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this derogatory view
is treated dismissively in Trinity College Dublin’s
dedicated arts and humanities research institute,
the Trinity Long Room Hub.
Roy Foster, Carroll professor of Irish history
at Hertford College, Oxford, believes that con-
trary to the idea that the arts and humanities are
becoming less relevant, “the proposal for a top-
flight institute for advanced study in the
humanities seemed long overdue for Ireland”.
accepted knowledge, such as the use of woad
instead of lapis lazuli as a blue dye in the
manuscript.
Frank Boland is a professor of engineering
science at Trinity College, but he is involved in
the arts and humanities faculty through an
interdisciplinary project funded by the Trinity
Long Room Hub, entitled The Book: Discovering
Sounds Initiative.
“Education and learning in all disciplines
have never been more relevant to the wellbeing
of society,” Boland says.
In 2004, the university’s English faculty
digitised pages from the Trinity College
manuscripts of Piers Plowman to demonstrate
what the medieval book can tell us about a text,
the authorship of the text, the scribe and the
people who had access to the document during
its existence. The Discovering Sounds Initiative
aims to build on that project to include voice
synchronisation, offering interpretation, translation
and transcription.
Catherine Kane, from the Centre for Learning
Technology at Trinity College, is also involved in
the project, which she believes “will enrich the
users’ experience, engagement and understanding
of precious manuscripts and resources in the
library”.
“Educational establishments such as Trinity
Foster has been an external advisory member
of the Trinity Long Room Hub since the project’s
inception.
“This is a vital development for the higher
education sector in Ireland because it comes at
a time when the technology of knowledge storage,
dissemination and retrieval has been revolu-
tionised by digitalisation and electronic
communications circuits,” he says.
His thoughts on the building that will house
the Trinity Long Room Hub are similarly posi-
tive: “A newly built state-of-the-art research
centre will be able to benefit directly from
‘The Trinity Long Room Hub
offers opportunities for
interdisciplinary collaboration,
but still preserves a place for
traditional research methods’
College Dublin have vast collections of precious
resources that can be difficult to make available
to students, from our slide collections on
history of art and Classics to precious documents
in our library collections,” Kane says. “Using an
ICT-centred approach makes access to these
resources possible without damage to the
originals.”
The Trinity Long Room Hub is also home to
the interdisciplinary Atlas of Language Politics
in Modern Central Europe project, headed by
Tomasz Kamusella, the Thomas Brown lecturer
in Slavonic Studies in the School of Languages,
Literature and Cultural Studies. The Atlas offers
an insight into the mechanisms and history of how
languages have been made, unmade and deployed
for political ends in the age of nationalism, from
the 19th to the 21st century.
The arts and humanities are not always thought
of in political terms, but this project shows just
how important the discipline is in being able to
offer crucial insight into religious conflicts
throughout history and around the world –
knowledge that is of overwhelming relevance in
today’s divided societies.
Kamusella’s project is based, he says, on the
premise that “peoples and states have frequently
quarrelled, gone to war, and even committed
genocides over language as a symbol of group
identity and group difference. But this has been
so to a highly unusual extent in modern Central
Europe, where the politicised equation of language
with nation and state became the sole legitimising
basis of state-building in the region after the First
World War.”
Kamusella attributes his success in getting
this project off the ground to the willingness of
the Trinity Long Room Hub to be more flexible
in its funding than other institutions.
“Novel research, involving unprecedented
configurations of scholars, subject matter and
external parties in the context of the fast-changing
realities of the EU and the globalising world,
requires novel approaches to funding,” he says.
As well as offering new opportunities for
academics, these new developments in the way
arts and humanities subjects are researched,
taught and made accessible hold a huge appeal
for students.
“Arts and humanities need to be seen as
innovative and forward thinking and also need to
address issues of access and accessibility,” Kane
says. “Today’s students have grown up in a very
mobile, technical world. They are comfortable with
technology and its integration into all aspects of
their lives. This includes education.”
However, Boland urges caution to those keen
to see the back of traditional forms of academic
research and teaching. “There are difficult
challenges regarding ensuring the credibility of
sources and material,” he says. “The ease and
perfection of alterations to images and the
propagation of inaccuracies through generations
of electronic documents are two such challenges,
for example.”
As one might expect of members of the
scholarly community at Ireland’s oldest university,
those at the Trinity Long Room Hub are
unlikely to forget the importance of preserving
historical materials and methods.
The institute offers unique opportunities for
interdisciplinary collaboration and international
academic cooperation and debate in key areas,
but still preserves a place for traditional research
and teaching methods.
“Digital archives can never replace the
communications circuit that is set up by people
interacting face to face, and mind to mind, in a
stimulating environment,” Foster says.
With that interaction in mind, the Trinity
Long Room Hub has already hosted a number
of visiting scholars and a range of international
projects are in the pipeline.
One final area in which the arts and
humanities may consider looking to the past
while remaining at the cutting edge of modern
academic research is that of interdisciplinary
collaboration. The rigid concept of individual
faculty disciplines is a very modern approach,
which bears little relation to the tradition of the
polymath – the Renaissance ideal of a well-
rounded education.
As Boland observes: “Collaboration in
research between the arts and humanities and
engineering is a very useful way to encourage
mutual understanding of the potential of new
technology and creativity in envisaging new
applications.
“These ideas are making a return to the
academy, through the avenues of
multidisciplinary conferences and journals. But
initiatives such as the Trinity Long Room Hub
may be the most effective way to integrate the
disciplines, in terms of academic research as well
as education,” he adds.
“The interdisciplinary approach of the Hub
is certainly one of the factors that is already
attracting substantial interest from the
international scholarly community,” Foster says,
“but it has also given Trinity the means to
contribute to Ireland’s academic standing by
creating the sort of intersections that have long
been a feature of communities such as the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
in Washington and the European University
Institute in Florence.”
this, and incorporate it in the most up-to-date
way.”
The Trinity Long Room Hub incorporates such
developments impressively, seamlessly using new
technology to promote the rich, historical archive
collection owned by Trinity College, an institution
founded in the 16th century. The college
showcases these developments in a plethora of
online exhibitions and large-scale projects, which
combine a thoroughly modern approach with the
culture and heritage of centuries past.
Projects such as the multidisciplinary initiative
between the conservation and physics departments
on the Book of Kells overturned previously
I

7. 9 September 2010 Times Higher Education 1312 Times Higher Education 9 September 2010
Home and away
OlgaWojtas onTrinity College’s cultural outreach work in Dublin,globally
relevant postgraduate programmes and historic links with SouthAsia
rinity College Dublin has had a
dynamic relationship with its local
community for over 400 years. It
was a concerted campaign by the
local community, spearheaded by the Dublin
Corporation, that led to the university being
founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1592. The
first lectures in the Irish language were delivered
in 1628, and while it may have once been seen
as a university of the Protestant ascendancy,
Trinity has been admitting Catholics since 1793.
More recently, the institution’s tradition of
engagement with the local community has been
further enhanced through a multidisciplinary
project, Creative Arts, Technology and Culture.
This innovative project is putting Trinity
College at the heart of Dublin’s cultural outreach.
There is an urgent need for research into the ways
higher education can contribute to the
increasingly sought-after “creative city” status,
and the project’s first study is an investigation
downturn, but research fellow Johanna Archbold
says that cultural collaboration will make sound
economic sense. Resources and expertise can be
pooled and duplication avoided.
Trinity College is already the city’s third-
biggest tourist attraction, after the Guinness
Storehouse and Dublin Zoo, Holm says. “There’s
an immediate sense of opening a gateway to a
world of love for learning.”
Visitors tend to focus principally on the Book
of Kells (a highly illustrated biblical manuscript
produced by Celtic monks in around AD800), but
Trinity College is now set to highlight a much
broader range of its treasures and its research,
for example through digital displays.
Expectations for the external impact of the Hub
are on the same scale as for the science gallery
at the other end of the Trinity campus. Unlike the
Hub, the science gallery is purpose-built for
public access, and it hosts exhibitions and special
events throughout the year where the public can
interact with and understand science through
the arts.
Hegarty believes the Trinity Long Room Hub
can become, like the science gallery, “a place in
the consciousness of the country, on the trail as
a place to visit, and a place that has a spark and
is new and edgy”. He expects the Hub “to be a
nerve centre for helping to organise events across
the arts and humanities that would not be possible
of the existing links between Trinity College and
nearby museums, libraries and galleries to see
how these can be exploited further.
Spearheaded by Trinity’s provost, John
Hegarty, the project reconnects the city’s many
cultural activities – museums, theatre, music,
literature and language – by rethinking not only
how they operate and their role in the 21st
century, but also how they interact with the
university.
Russian-born Anastasia Dukova
is in the third year of a PhD
investigating crime and policing
in Dublin, Brisbane and London
in the second half of the 19th
century. She believes that the
comparative research has given
her enormous opportunities,
both personal and academic.
She has made research trips to
Australia, and has links with
the Australian Research Council
Centre of Excellence in Policing
and Security at Griffith
University in Brisbane.
“I think universities should
encourage their research students
to participate in an international
academic exchange,” she says.
“I’m considering a
postdoctorate degree in
criminology. My research requires
knowledge of the legal and
punitive systems of Ireland,
England and the colony of
Queensland. I hope this diverse
approach to criminal history and
criminology will make my
knowledge and skills equally
effective in Europe and in
Australia.”
Her PhD is funded through the
Irish Research Council for the
Humanities and Social Sciences,
set up in 2000 to boost Ireland’s
research capacity. She says she
was attracted by the prominence
of humanities and social sciences
at Trinity College, and has been
impressed by the quality of its
collections and its academic
supervision.
The university’s links with South
Asia go back almost 250 years,
with the establishment of a
chair of oriental languages in
1762. Trinity College had a major
impact on the development of
India in the 19th century, not
only via its graduates in
disciplines such as engineering,
law and medicine, but also
thanks to 150 graduates from its
Indian Civil Service
School. Early in the 20th
century, Sir George
Grierson, who studied
mathematics and Sanskrit
at Trinity College,
produced his massive
Linguistic Survey of India.
Those links are now being
given fresh impetus through the
university’s South Asia Initiative,
bringing together 70 academics
from across the institution, who
until now have been teaching and
researching on South Asia in
relative isolation. The initiative is
chaired by Jürgen Barkhoff, Trinity
College’s registrar (an academic
position).
“With Ireland becoming such a
multicultural society in the past 10
years, we wanted to use this
initiative not only to strengthen
teaching and research, but also to
strengthen awareness of these
cultures in Ireland,” he says.
Strong support has come from
the local Indian community, with
more than 20 organisations
coming together to fund a new
lectureship in Indian history and
culture.
The Indian Council for Cultural
Relations is also helping to
establish visiting professorships.
“These posts will form the
nucleus of a Centre for Indian
Studies,” Barkhoff says.
The South Asia Initiative has
already hosted lectures by
T
In a major development for the college, Trinity
is now collaborating with the creative industries
to deliver courses for actors, directors and lighting
designers, curators and conservationists as well
as other practitioners. This work is critical in
repositioning the university – which is a key
objective of the Hub project – by creating a two-
way flow of information in and out of the
university, and creating connections across
disciplines.
Hegarty explains: “It is like having a porous
university where the boundaries are not so clear-
cut any more, and where ideas and people can
move easily across those blurred boundaries.”
Poul Holm, academic director of the Trinity
Long Room Hub, says: “What we are trying to
do is develop a new platform for the new
humanities. The IT revolution will let us unlock
our treasures.”
Funding for the Trinity Long Room Hub project
was earmarked before the worldwide economic
Amartya Sen, the economist
and Nobel laureate, and Abdul
Kalam, the former president
of India.
The university is showcasing
the centuries-old links between
Trinity College, Europe and India in
a major exhibition, Nabobs,
Soldiers and Imperial Service: The
Irish in India, drawing on a
material from the 19th and early
20th century held in its library.
• The exhibition runs until 3
October 2010. For more
information, visit www.tcd.ie/
Library/about/exhibitions
Forward-looking Holm keen to unlock riches
before”, hosting talks, exhibitions, events and
being recognised for its activity in its own right.
Collaboration with neighbouring institutions
could also be a draw for students, allowing
opportunities for joint postgraduate courses and
internships.
“This would be particularly interesting to
international students, providing employment
for postgraduates and an area of potential income
generation,” Archbold says.
Trinity College has already launched Texts,
Contexts, Cultures, a revolutionary postgraduate
programme that is leading the transformation of
the European PhD, according to Crawford
Gribben, Trinity Long Room Hub senior lecturer
in early modern print culture.
The programme was developed jointly by
Trinity College, University College Cork and the
National University of Ireland Galway, and is
designed to integrate new technologies and
professional placements into the traditional PhD.
There are currently some 40 students on the
programme, 15 of them at Trinity College. They
develop their research under the guidance of a
supervisory panel that is often interdisciplinary
and multi-institutional, including academics
from leading institutions in North America and
Europe. Students have the opportunity to take a
placement linked to the knowledge economy,
backed by training and seminars in career and
aptitude development. Giving students these
new skills will increase their employability,
Trinity College scholars believe.
Gribben says: “We receive applications from
all over the world, from students with bachelor’s
and master’s degrees, from recent graduates
and others with significant work experience
and professional successes.”
Kayoko Yukimura, who took her
undergraduate and master’s degrees at Kobe
University in Japan, is in the first year of a
doctorate funded through Rotary International’s
Ambassadorial Scholarship scheme.
She is investigating the maritime
communities of southern Ireland after the
Jacobite War, and is keeping in close touch
with postgraduates and professors in Japan.
“There are many researchers of European
history in my country,” she says. “They are
interested in the way historians in Ireland and
other European countries study history. I report
the latest trends of historiography in the
Republic of Ireland and Europe to them.”
She has been struck by the wealth of
resources in the Trinity College library, notably
the digital databases that are invaluable to
history researchers.
“Trinity College’s active interaction with
other academic institutions, both domestic and
international, is impressive,” she says.

8. 9 September 2010 Times Higher Education 1514 Times Higher Education 9 September 2010
Creative
network
ith the global economy in turmoil,
government funding for research
projects has become increasingly
scarce worldwide. This has been
particularly marked in the arts and humanities,
an issue that David Lloyd, dean of research at
Trinity College Dublin, is keen to highlight.
“In recent years, the distribution of national
research funding has probably been 80 per cent
for sciences, 12 per cent for social sciences and
only 8 per cent for the arts,” Lloyd says.
“There is thus a tenfold difference between
what the sciences get and what the arts and
humanities get and that can’t be sustained.
There needs to be a balancing out if we’re going
to place an importance on culture in society. The
current situation is a bit of a travesty.”
Lloyd has a biochemistry background, while
Trinity College’s provost, John Hegarty, is a
physicist and Patrick Prendergast, the vice-
provost, is a specialist in biomechanics
engineering. Yet all three are agreed on the
importance of the arts and humanities, both in
academe and in society generally.
“No matter what our academic backgrounds
are, we’re all immersed in the arts and
humanities in our cultural lives and we all have
an appreciation of it,” Prendergast says. “I don’t
believe in C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ concept. To
me, this is a simplistic understanding of human
endeavour and academic research.”
The question is how to translate this belief
that all academic disciplines are not only equally
after extensive digital repair work. The films,
made between 1910 and 1913, are important
parts of Ireland’s cultural heritage, Kokaram
says. Although some of the films were made into
DVDs a decade ago, they have not been widely
seen since the 1920s, he estimates. “There is an
interesting connection between the preservation
of cultural heritage and hardcore mathematics.”
The Trinity Long Room Hub’s approach is
innovative, but contemporary research culture at
Trinity College has been influenced by
international academic developments as well.
Prendergast recalls: “I was particularly impressed
by the way the PhD is done in the Netherlands.
Graduate study often involves students putting
together a curriculum of courses in universities
around the country and they study and research
in a very collaborative and interactive way. As
the island of Ireland is relatively small, this is
something I would like to see us doing here. I
would like students to be able to take advantage
of the specialist skills and expertise of members
of the faculty in universities around the country.”
It is hoped that the Trinity Long Room Hub
development will facilitate knowledge transfer
through the digitisation of archives, as well as in
the creation of new platforms for education in
important, but interconnected, into modern and
viable research models. This is a challenge that
Trinity College hopes the Trinity Long Room
Hub will go some way towards addressing.
An evolution in arts and humanities research,
which enables a traditional discipline to remain
relevant and contemporary, is to be welcomed.
How it is to be funded, though, is another matter.
“The arts and humanities need to find a new
way of operating and becoming self-sustaining, so
we must diversify. The government needs to start
seeing investing in the arts and humanities as an
investment in the country’s future, but we’re also
looking to philanthropy,” Hegarty says.
Partnershipswithculturalinstitutions,including
museums, galleries and libraries, afford arts and
humanities researchers greater opportunities for
engagement with the public, opportunities that
‘We want the Trinity Long
Room Hub to become a
beacon for collaboration,
and for industry to look
to it for problem solving’
the academic community and industry.”
Prendergast says his aim is for “the Trinity
Long Room Hub to become a beacon for this kind
of collaboration. I want industry to think of the
Trinity Long Room Hub straight away as a place
to find arts and humanities researchers to work
with on developing projects and problem solving.”
Anil Kokaram’s research work on restoring
damaged film has developed into an important
innovation for the multibillion-dollar film industry
and is a stellar example of what such
collaborations can achieve. An associate professor
in Trinity College’s department of electronic and
electrical engineering, Kokaram’s digital film
restoration methods were used to create special
effects on films such as The Matrix Reloaded,
King Kong and Casino Royale, and earned him and
his collaborators an Academy Award in 2007.
His early consultancy work with The Foundry,
an external media company, is now a long-term
relationship and has evolved into collaborative
stereo post-production work for the new
generation of 3D films such as Avatar.
At the same time, his team’s restoration work
continues. A project with film historian and
professor of drama at Trinity College Kevin
Rockett will see the release this month of six films
W
virtual learning environments. These strategies
will work in tandem with the creation of a cutting-
edge Innovation Academy for PhD researchers.
The Trinity College Dublin-University College
Dublin Innovation Academy will coordinate
generic and discipline-specific training for some
Graduate Research Education Programmes, and
has been established as a component of the TCD-
UCD Innovation Alliance.
According to Hegarty: “When students
complete a PhD they will have gone very deep
into their particular topic, but the Innovation
Academy will ensure that they have acquired a
sense of the wider world and of what they can do
with their skills and new knowledge.”
The Innovation Academy will encourage
interdisciplinary collaboration from an early
stage in a student’s research career. Lloyd notes:
“In the Innovation Academy we are bringing
together people from different disciplines and
putting them all into the mix to solve a series of
problems that can’t be addressed by an individual
but could be addressed by an interdisciplinary
team. The Innovation Academy will imbue
problem solving with creativity.”
The Dutch model that impressed Prendergast
is also in evidence in future plans for the
Innovation Academy. “We are hoping the model
will roll out nationally,” Lloyd says. “We will
make the content available to anyone who wants
it and we’ll train trainers who want to bring this
model back to their universities.”
Ultimately, he says, producing skilled, ICT-
and business-savvy arts and humanities
graduates is the key to ensuring long-term
sustainability for arts and humanities research.
Equipped with creative, independent thought,
self-motivation and innovation, it is hoped that
future generations of PhD graduates and post-
doctoral researchers will go further in exploring
the potential for the role of arts and humanities
in modern society, the economy and in industry.
Prendergast says: “We shouldn’t try to second-
guess where PhDs will end up. They may create
their own jobs in the knowledge industries of the
future, and this is something we want to support.”
Such support is vital not only for sustaining
arts and humanities research in the future but
for capitalising on opportunities for society as
a whole. Lloyd concludes: “There are new
markets to come out of this, and if we’re not
producing the graduates with the appropriate
skills and training, then we’re going to miss out
on being part of them.”
Diversification,integration and digital innovation are
key to sustaining arts and humanities research,say
Trinity College scholars.Maeve O’Lynn reports
Hegarty is keen to see Trinity College embrace.
In addition to these partnerships, the provost
advocates “stronger engagements with the creative
industries”. Prendergast agrees. “It is important
that we reach out to industry and try to collaborate
by showing industry what we can do. We can
achieve this by showcasing the talents of our
staff and students. We want to enable organic
collaborations by facilitating interactions between
Hegarty ‘the arts and humanities must diversify’Prendergast ‘collaborate’