Newspaper Reports of the Westminster Parliament

This chapter examines changing patterns of newspaper reporting of the proceedings of the Westminster Parliament during the twentieth century. It offers a detailed case study of coverage at a key moment and argues that since the 1990s, newspaper reports from the House fluctuated greatly in number and kind while also exhibiting a growing focus on lobby reporting at the expense of the Gallery tradition since the 1930s. Drawing on contemporary interviews with Parliamentary correspondents, combined with content analysis of national newspaper coverage, the chapter highlights the striking decline in press reports across all national newspapers as well as the alleged ‘dumbing down’ of published Parliamentary stories. The chapter concludes by exploring the possibilities of digitally native editorial formats such as live blogging, developed at the end of the twentieth century, for enhancing Parliamentary coverage.

Public Archaeology

Unlike other academic disciplines, archaeology has always involved a public dimension, and from its origins in antiquarian curiosity to ‘citizen science’ and ‘crowdfunding’ of modern research archaeologists have generally acknowledged their obligation to make information on heritage research publicly available. Major exhibitions in national museums have also demonstrated the scale of public interest, though visitor numbers to museums and heritage attractions generally have been adversely affected, except for major tourist attractions, whenever entrance charges have been imposed. In response to economic demands many museums have shifted priorities from curation and research to public outreach with an emphasis upon interactive displays, whilst staffing structures have subordinated academic qualifications to commercial and marketing criteria. Television archaeology has proved popular from the 1950s to the present day, though, in contrast to allied disciplines, there has been a consistent trend in archaeology to dumbing down presentation. Experimental archaeology too has seen progressive dumbing down from serious practical research into early agriculture or building technology to re-enactment for entertainment alone.

Inclusion of research labs in Engineering as learning playgrounds

Traditional teaching practices in Ireland for “hard”-science subjects, such as Physics or Engineering, are still prevalently based on whiteboard content delivery, PowerPoint-based methods, and sometimes, within under-funded purposed-built teaching labs, leaving very little manoeuvre or willingness to incorporate student interaction, in addition to a strong focus on end of semester exam based assessment of learning. Very often any deviation from traditional methods of teaching and assessment are perceived as “dumbing down” the course. The proposal of this Lightning Talk is to show how enabling flexibility in the teaching environment, by incorporating either topical research discussions or bringing a high-tech research lab to a teaching module, can stimulate student engagement, curiosity, discovery and learning. Moreover, the talk will also contain a discussion on using different assessment techniques, such as consultation surveys and reports, where a richer picture of true understanding can be drafted, and compare outcomes between report-based and exam-based types of assessment, showing no signs of “dumbing down”.

Stephen Jay Gould’s Essays: Experiencing the Sublime

“This View of Life,” Stephen Jay Gould’s long-running essay series, forms a massive refutation of any charge that in popularized science truth and entertainment are incompatible. These essays invariably “follow two unbreakable rules,” Gould writes: “I never lie and I strive mightily not to bore you.” In the prologue to the collection Bully for Brontosaurus, Gould is more explicit concerning his first rule: “No compromises with conceptual richness; no bypassing of ambiguity or ignorance; removal of jargon, of course, but no dumbing down of ideas (any conceptual complexity can be conveyed in English).” Concerning the second rule, Gould is silent: he practices but does not reflect on his ability to shock us, to imitate in prose the last line of Muir’s “The Animals.” On the surface, a statement of biblical fact, its position at the poem’s end belies its factual status. We experience instead the shock of our existential state, burdened by history, by memory, by the apprehension of death. Muir has sprung a surprise, giv-ing us an experience Longinus long ago described, the literary sublime. By literary means as well, in his essays on science and its history, Gould can spring analogous surprises. In Gould, however, the literary sublime is always in the service of its scientific counterpart. I single out a group among his three hundred essays, each of which is so structured that we vicariously experience the process of discovery. Their twists and turns seem at first to lead nowhere; no picture emerges until, suddenly, one does, a surprise that evokes the experience of the scientific sublime. A very young Adam Smith—an Adam Smith well before The Wealth of Nations—tells us how us how surprise opens a path to this sublime: “When one accustomed object appears after another, which it does not usually follow, it first excites, by its unexpectedness, the sentiment properly called surprise, and afterwards, by the singularity of the succession, or order of its appearance, the sentiment properly called wonder.”