Adam Crymble
PhD Student (with History)
Email adam.crymble@kcl.ac.uk
Digital Humanities
King’s College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London
WC2B 5RL
Title
Tracing Irish Stereotypes in London, 1801-1821: A Large-Scale Textual Analysis
Supervisor
Ian McBride
Second Supervisor
Willard McCarty
Funding
Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship in 19th C. Media
Research
On January 1st 1801 the Irish parliament ceased to exist, and Irish MPs took up their place in Westminster under a united – though politically divided – parliament. The same day in the London newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, a Mr. Hopkins placed an advertisement offering Irish dance lessons. An odd choice and a venture sure to fail in a city that unanimously resented and disdained the Irish as thieves, prostitutes, and beggars. Or was it?
Historical research of the nineteenth century overwhelmingly paints a negative picture of the London attitude towards Irish immigrants. Historians have repeatedly pointed to caricatures of monkey-faced Irishmen threatening violence against good English gentlemen as evidence for this hatred. Strife sells. And traditional archival research means these extreme examples are easier to find because they stand out in the minds of archivists and researchers who return to them again and again. Yet no historian to my knowledge has ever asked why Mr. Hopkins thought people would pay him to learn Irish dance.
Since much of the historical research on the London Irish has been written, the world has changed drastically. Massive, reliable, scholarly datasets have appeared online in formats that allow large-scale interrogation. Complex statistical textual analysis and data-mining mean that we no longer need to scan through microfilm looking for relevant articles to cite, hoping for a juicy quote. Instead we can ask what tens of thousands of articles said about the Irish. Were they positive? Were they negative? And what external factors influenced their tone or content? Using data-mining we can now discern whether or not the London Irish were overrepresented in the courts, underrepresented in certain neighbourhoods, or industries, or even how popular their native dance was amongst the English.
A more balanced, more realistic picture will begin to emerge, which has only recently become possible.
Biography
Adam holds a Masters of Public History from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, as well as a Diploma in Writing and Professional Communication. Adam is an experienced academic web developer and President of Academic News (http://academic-news.org), a limited company that offers affordable websites to academics looking for a professional, simple way to showcase and subsequently archive their academic event. That experience helped Adam and two of his colleagues win the 2011 KCL Lion’s Den business plan competition, which provided support for a new online tutoring business, MyScholar Ltd (http://myscholar.co.uk), offering live maths tutoring throughout the UK.
Teaching
Graduate Teaching Assistant: KCL History: Early Modern Britain 1500-1750 [2011-2012]
Workshop Organizer: Reaching a Popular Audience, Vancouver and London, Canada [2009-2010]