Exploring the Tobar an Dualchais Online Resource
Friday 25th of June
10am - 12pm
Dr Mairi McFadyen, Flòraidh Forrest & Liam Crouse
About the Presenters
Dr Mairi McFadyen is an independent creative freelancer whose practice is informed by her background in ethnology and cultural anthropology. She holds an award-winning PhD from the University of Edinburgh where she taught for several years in the Department of Celtic & Scottish Studies.
Since her appointment in 2019, Tobar an Dualchais Director Floraidh Forrest has used her background in media to raise the profile of the initiative and encourage deeper engagement with the recordings within the wider cultural and creative industries and local communities.
Liam Alastair Crouse is a first-year PhD student at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig UHI studying the folklore of Uist with the aim of analysing and unlocking Tobar an Dualchais’ rich collection of Gaelic-language recordings and contextualising them within a corpus of orally-derived material stretching over 170 years.
About the Session
Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches (TAD) is the Nation’s online resource dedicated to the presentation and promotion of audio recordings of Scotland’s cultural heritage including songs, music, history, poetry, traditions and stories collected from across Scotland from the 1930s onwards.
This workshop will explore why the material was collected and by whom, and how and why it is of value today. Participants will be introduced to some of the many important tradition bearers whose recordings populate the archives and be given the tools to explore the material with greater efficiency and understanding. PhD student Liam Alastair Crouse will also demonstrate how he used the archive to explore how traditional material is transformed over time through sustained retelling.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this session, participants will:
- have knowledge of the key tradition bearers and fieldworkers who are presented on the TAD website
- be introduced to how the recordings can be relevant to key issues that relate to our lives now, such as climate change
- know how to search the TAD website for recordings related to their own research interests
- see how the recordings can be applied to academic research.
Event contact: Floraidh Forrest, ff1.smo@uhi.ac.uk
Click Here to Register (Please note that places are limited and will be allocated on a first come first served basis)
First published: 20 May 2021
