Association of Celtic Students

  This blog post is loosely based on a dissertation completed for my final year at the University of Edinburgh and contains references to interviews conducted as part of field research. We have all seen multiple new years. Whether you go out clubbing, watch the fireworks under a cosy blanket outside or stay at home and pretend that the new year isn’t coming your way – we all must go through the point of transition to a new year. However, in Scotland, there is something more to a new year’s celebration. Scotland prides itself on the tradition of Hogmanay – the Scottish concept word for a new year. Hogmanay encompasses both the day before and after the turning of the clock into a new January. The essence of a Hogmanay is also contained in the food we eat at this time of year, the music we listen to, the people we see and the traditions we partake in.  A form of Hogmanay can be argued to have taken place since the Celts were located in Scotland and holds a huge importance to Scot...

YouTube and other such public mediums are filled with misleading information about medieval Irish literature. Errors range from the benign, tellings of medieval narratives by non-experts that miss key details or misinterpret events, to misinformed, where members of the public repeat out-of-date scholarly arguments, to the actively malignant, with at least two Fascists publishing forged or edited versions of medieval tales on YouTube. Correcting all of these is impossible for the same reason that point-by-point challenging Gish Gallop arguments (a style of argument intended to flood the opponent with so many poor, unsourced, or untrue pieces of evidence it is extremely time consuming to systematically refute due to the sheer volume of errors confidently stated) is futile, but, that does not mean that we as scholars must abandon the public to the digital wilderness. Instead, it just requires an alternative tactical choice. Several years ago, I, Emmet Taylor, the previous manager of the b...

                   Many people are not aware of the historic and current presence of Gaelic in the North-East of Scotland. In fact, there was an Aberdeenshire Gaelic dialect in existence until 1984. The University of Aberdeen has been a central hub for Gaelic for much of its existence as an institution. Students have come to study Gaelic from the Gàidhealtachd, as well as from across the world. The Celtic Society was formed both by students from Celtic backgrounds, and by those who had taken an interest in the Celtic languages and cultures.          The Celtic Society is one of the oldest societies at the University, and was once the largest. The large number of Gaels coming to study at the University helped the society to thrive and grow in membership. It is difficult to say when the society first began, as students from Gaelic backgrounds had already been meeting together as a group due to their shared...

This blog post is based on the information provided by the Brittany Movie Archive , my personal knowledge, and the interview given a few months ago by Marie Carrez to the Cinémathèque du documentaire, on her suggestion. Said interview is available here , in French. I would like to thank Marie Carrez once again for her help and diligence in organising the screening for the conference. Still from “ Purée géante à Brest ” [litt. Giant mashed potatoes in Brest], amateur movie from Daniel Jacolot, 1986 freely available here . Do you recognize Brest’s main square? For those of you who came to our last conference, you may have attended the screening of a documentary titled “ Americans in Brest in 1917 ”. Made by the Brittany Movie Archive, it presents archives shot by the Sammies themselves stationed in Brest during the First World War, sources that were not largely available in France before. While it may seem a bit far from our usual fields of work in Celtic studies, it’s a an important par...

This month, I will give you a quick overview of how to view manuscript images online using the (now standard) International Image Interoperability Framework ( IIIF , pronounced ‘triple-i F’). Though the name may sound scary, there is really no reason to be afraid! For the more technologically enclined amongst you, I would recommend checking out the IIIF website to find out more about how it works, as well as any news and events happening. For everyone else, all you need to know is that IIIF enables you to view and interact with images on a web browser in more ways than a browser can allow on its own (e.g. deep zoom, comparison, colour changes etc). And on top of that, more and more universities and libraries now use it to display their digitised objects, so it’s extremely useful to know how to make the most of its functionalities. There are two “technical” elements you should know about when using IIIF: Image viewer : this is the software that allows viewing and manipulation of image...