January – Data Visualisation and a historic Irish author

January was packed with content, from Data Visualisation for college, to a symposium on an Irish writer, and being invited to feature on Shepherd.com with my science fiction. I enjoyed recommending five books to SF lovers. See my page here.
https://shepherd.com/best-books/peopl...

My Data Visualisation course uses Tableau, specialist software that works with data analytic languages R and R Shiny. I have been learning to make graphs, tables, maps and satellite maps with this suite. We had a two-day class online, back at the start of December; I made copious notes and had excellent lecturer’s notes. The assignment had to be presented as a report, which would be a usual application for data viz work.
This is for a Certificate at Master’s Degree standard, so a few days were taken up in presentation finicking, typing the references and teaching myself how to put a border around an inserted screenshot of a chart. My last four years have been concentrating on journalism, but I had produced reports and regularly read science studies, which helped.

I had already submitted an essay on the context of data viz following a class in November. Instead of a presentation to class, as we were online, we each had to record in Word three minutes of spoken explanation to accompany a Word slideshow. My podcast skills came in useful for this aspect. I hadn’t recorded in Word, but it was actually easy. Getting it just right took longer. Thanks to IADT and the Creative Futures Academy for providing this course.

Trinity College’s Long Room Hub provided a fascinating day of talks about Padraig Colum, Irish author and poet (1881 – 1972). This man left Ireland for America in 1914, so compared to some contemporaries enjoyed a long and fruitful career. Colum was born in a workhouse, as his father was the manager, and the experience informed his writing. He wrote Old Woman Of The Roads and She Moved Through The Fair.

Colum was among the early members of the Abbey Theatre, along with founders WB Yeats and Lady Gregory. His plays were popular, with simple sets so they could be re-produced, and dealt with life in rural Ireland. 2 April, 1902, saw the first performance of his play Kathleen Ni Houlihán, an allegory for Ireland, with Maud Gonne (Yeats’s unrequited love) in the title role.

Later, in America, Colum wrote short stories and poetry. The short story was considered to be the major Irish literary form. One of his works was The Big Tree – a collection of stories and poems about a village, with frontispiece illustrated by Jack B Yeats. While Colum and his wife Mary (Maguire) Colum both continued writing, Mary Maguire Colum was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships in 1930 and 1938.

Colum wrote a review of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Mary reviewed Ulysses. Newspaper reviews were essential to promote awareness and understanding of Irish literature in America at that time. Colum wrote the preface to James Joyce Remembered by Constantine Curran. He was also the biographer of Arthur Griffith, having accompanied that man to the landing of arms at Howth in 1914 ahead of the Easter Rising. Griffith was a printer, journalist and Irish nationalist, who became President of the Dáil in 1922.

Typical lovely little quotes from the day, shown on a screen:
“From Abbey St to College Green, a walk of five minutes, one could meet everyone of importance in the life of the city at a certain time of the afternoon.” [Dublin]

“Joyce operates like a general,” I remarked to Ernest Hemingway, who was in the shop. “A general of the Jesuits,” he returned.

Colum took US citizenship in 1945. He travelled widely, including to Italy. During his late eighties, he was still happily addressing college groups. The Governor of Hawaii asked him to write up the traditional Hawaiian myths in a book suitable for children. A first edition of this book was presented by Ireland’s Taoiseach to Barack Obama when the US President visited Ireland.

Many thanks to the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive, TCD, UCD and the Long Room Hub. A comment was that so many people do the heavy lifting, making pages and pages of notes on this kind of topic, and only publish a surface amount. A bibliography would be a good project.

And that’s a good place for me to announce that my BA (Hons) graduation will occur in late March.
My husband and I are greatly looking forward to the day. I’m delighted that this will be held in the Concert Hall of the Royal Dublin Society, of which I am a longstanding member.


Since I mentioned Trinity College, I am making this book free, Murder At Irish Mensa. Grab it, 17 – 20 February 2022.
Anyone not in the UK or Ireland should use the Amazon.com link.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00E5JMQP4

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E5JMQP4

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https://clareobeara.journoportfolio.com/

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GadPp...

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