Hi, I am Pádraig Mac Aodhgáin (Patrick Egan), a Research Data Management Librarian, but also a digital humanist, ethnomusicologist, web developer and musician currently based in Cork city, Ireland.
I would be known as a musician, playing and teaching concertina in Irish traditional music for over thirty years. Find out more about my music here.
I hold a BSc in Information Technology, an MA in Ethnomusicology and PhD in Digital Humanities and Ethnomusicology at University College Cork, Ireland (UCC). After completing his MA in 2008, I co-founded “Outreach Ethnomusicology”, an online Ethnomusicology community when in order to share the results of fieldwork with other MA students at the University of Limerick. This is now a resource where students, professors, performers, archivists, and music enthusiasts can share their music-related experiences. Find out more about Outreach Ethnomusicology.
Since 2008, I have become passionately interested in the digital humanities and attended King’s College, London in 2012 where I conducted research on the repatriation of digital collections of cultural heritage. I then completed a PhD in digital arts and humanities with ethnomusicology at UCC (2014-2018). My thesis was entitled “Exploring ethnography and digital visualisation: a study of musical practice through the contextualisation of music related projects from the Seán Ó Riada Collection”. My work contributes to theory in the fields of Digital Humanities, Archival Science, and Ethnomusicology.
During my PhD studies, I developed what I call a “digital visualisation framework” that supports the contextualisation of documents within the Seán Ó Riada Collection. The primary web coding languages used in this project were PHP, MySQL, D3JS with an API service. This project allows us to look through the collection in new ways. The collection was previously only findable and searchable through this descriptive list. The new interface links and connects the material from each music related project carried out by the composer Seán Ó Riada. This work came together in 2018 and resulted in a digital tool and resource that is available for future researchers.
A demonstration of this work is available here: https://oriada.o-em.org
In recent years I have taught as a lecturer and demonstrator in Digital Arts and Humanities and Interactive Media at UCC.
In 2019 I was a Fellow in Digital Studies at the Kluge Center (Library of Congress, Washington DC). Follow the code for this project on Github.com here.
I also work as a freelance website editor and developer, and most recently contracted on a website called “People Per Hour”. Read more about that People Per Hour’s website.
