Twitter

This is a worlde of my blog as it stands at the minute. Yes you read that right. I only heard about Wordle for the first time today and think it is a very effective tool to give you a snapshot of the frequency of words appearing in any given space. I just pasted the URL of this blog into the create box on the Wordle site and it gave me a picture of the most commonly used words in my blog.

The word Twitter seems to be the most prominent word there at the minute - I suppose I have written a good deal about the uses of Twitter in my research. I will be writing a small bit more over the next while. So keep checking the blog for updates.

AFIS annual conference - Lille May 2011

I have just returned from the annual conference for the Association for Franco-Irish Studies (AFIS). It was held in Université de Charles de Gaule- Lille 3, or just Lille 3 for short.

The theme of the conference was 'Les irlandais en France et les français en irlande' or 'The Irish in France and the French in Ireland'. There were three keynote speeches, one by the French journalist, Sorj Chalandon, who reported from Northern Ireland for the French newspaper Libération during the the late 1970s until the 2000s. Professor Marianne Elliott, Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool, delivered a keynote speech on the experience of Wolfe Tone trying to enlist help in France for an Irish rebellion. Professor Jane Conroy from NUIG also delivered a keynote speech on a French visitor to Ireland in the late 18th century.

There was a very wide range of topics covered by the participants who presented 20 minute papers. I presented a paper on Simone Téry - a French journalist who was reporting from Ireland in the 1920s for the French press.

So much preparation must have gone into the organisation of the conference. Well done to AFIS and Lille 3 for organising such a great conference. This is a link to the conference on the Lille 3 homepage:

http://evenements.univ-lille3.fr/colloque-irlandais-francais/en/