iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

#speirgorm I’m looking for info. My nephew is doing an undergrad in environmental science - are there any organisations that allow students to do summer internships with them?

Picture of yellow flowers against blue skies and a green sea.

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

Followed by a fascinating tour of @dublincitylibs.bsky.social given by senior librarian Tara Doyle - including a first edition of Finnegan’s Wake, a map of Dublin from 1754 and a printed book of plays from 1636 - all far more robust and long lasting that the floppy disk

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

Happy World Digital Preservation Day y’all. Here is our wonderful memberships manager Maeve O’Brien introducing the work of @dri.ie #WDPID2025

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

A fascinating visit to the National Botanic Gardens in Ireland who are digitising their herbarium collection to make it more assessable to researchers and the public. Their collection is gold and crucial for tracking changes in the Irish ecosystem over 200 years @colinkelleher.bsky.social @dri.ie

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

Brigid died of Covid, three months after she moved into a nursing home. We miss her every day. ❤️

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

There was no funeral mass, only 11 of us were allowed to follow the coffin. Afterwards we had a funeral lunch for two.

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

This day, 5 years ago, we buried Brigid Sreenan, my mother in law. Friends lined the road as left for her funeral.

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

First Remembered Dress by Harriet O’Carroll #worldpoetryday

First Remembered Dress
It was red and white,
Red ground, white spots,
Smocking on the bodice,
Puff sleeves,
Sturdy cotton but pretty too,
Nearly to my knees.
A dress which did not inconvenience my lifestyle,
Those altogether necessary pursuits,
Tree climbing, egg collecting, puddle paddling,
Berry picking, bird nesting, wall walking.
A dress not found unsuitable by aunts
Or any of their lady friends
Up there above me.
A dress which went with me to pray,
To learn about the tragic death of my Redeemer.
A dress which nearly was my skin
When I was six.

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Post a picture of when your pet was little Dodger (El Dodgerino) and Artie (Lord Artful)

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

Lovely afternoon with my Digital Repository of Ireland colleagues visiting the letterpress print room at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin. Analogue is so much cooler than digital, the smell of the ink, the weight of the type. @dri-ie.bsky.social

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

My father used to tell me that long ago there existed a small furry animal called a shrove. Sadly this was hunted to extinction by people who flattened them with heavy sticks. Now on Shrove Tuesday, we eat pancakes in memory of the extinct shrove. Pity the poor shrove. #shrovetuesday

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

Bar man in Listowel says “You can do anything in life if you have a woolley hat”. True dat.

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

'Fragments of Victory: The Contemporary Irish Left' edited by @oisingilmore.bsky.social and @david-landy.bsky.social and published by Pluto Press. I have coauthored a chapter in it on the Irish Repeal referendum, focused on the activism of the Abortion Rights Campaign. #abortion #sociology

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Burawoy on the University, from burawoy.berkeley.edu/PS/Sociology...

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Like many, I’m shocked and saddened to hear of the untimely death of Michael Burawoy. My well thumbed copy of Manufacturing Consent is still on my bookshelf, much referred to when writing my own book on working time in software. Condolences to his family and friends.

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 23/10/2024

Todays I’m in @ucclibrary.bsky.social speaking about ensuring qualitative data is FAIR

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 09/10/2024

Brigid, Margaret and Stephanie from Southside Travellers Action Group talk with Michael Fortune about Irish Traveller traditions. Fascinating discussion about luck, money and remembering. I like the idea that robins are messengers from our dead loved ones. #HistFest24

A library. On the screen a film of two young Traveller women talking, sitting on the stage below the screen, three Traveller women are looking up at the screen.

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 26/09/2024

Two movies I watched this week & highly recommend: Fancy Dance (Apple TV) & Kneecap (in cinemas/rent online). Both speak to the importance of indigenous languages to cultural, identity and resistance to colonialisation. One a story of survival in Oklahoma, the other of revival in Belfast. #language

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 17/09/2024

Are you a working in academia? Are you a woman working in Ireland? You need to read @ProfPatOConnor memoir, launched today at @MU__SSI . It’s full of wisdom and humour. She is a trailblazer & has done a great service in documenting her struggles.

Pat O’Conner speaking at the launch of her book.

Cover of Pat O’Conners book “A ‘proper’ woman! One woman’s story of success and failure in academia.

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 16/09/2024

Books I read on my summer holidays

Front cover of the book The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylvaåinen

Front cover of the book One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden

Book cover of A ‘Proper’ Woman? One woman’s story of success and failure in academia by Pat P’Connor

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 31/08/2024

When my mother was told she would die, soon, of pancreatic cancer, she bought rucksacks for her grandchildren. By mistake she bought too many. After, I couldn’t bring myself to return the extra. Instead now, my partner and I bring them with us on holiday. We travel the world with her.❤️ #grief

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 28/08/2024

Also this, which is from a beautiful book called Birds,Art,Life and Death by Kyoto Maclear

A lull can be soothing, tranquilizing, and even restor-ative. It can be a time to retune and replenish. A lull can suggest a state of peaceful hovering, a prolonged mental daydream, a weightless interval. One can be lulled to sleep or lulled into a trance.
Yet for many artists I know, the word lull signifies the exact opposite: the absence, the flaw, the incom-pleteness, something lethal and dangerous, a source of fear and melancholia. There are layered reasons for this:
1. Superstition. A common and reasonable anxiety among artists is that creativity will flatline without constant practice. Confidence will wane, muscles will grow flaccid. What starts off as a lull will become a rut.
The muse will flee.
2. Capitalism. We live in a culture of high performance and competitiveness. Even artists, perennial outlanders who appear to have more freedom from conventional market expectations than most, feel they must maximize productivity and extract the most out of every day.

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 28/08/2024

Someone posted this quote by Simone Weil and I’ve found myself thinking about it a lot.

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 14/08/2024

This quote from Clara Bow, from a New Yorker article, speaks to me. When I feel lonely, when I ache for the chats with my mother, I read a book. In books I feel close to her.

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 21/03/2024

Some Cats Have That Effect on You by Harriet O’Carroll. #WorldPoetryDay2024

Some Cats have that Effect on You
The cat sat in the tree at the close of day.
She was a night-time tree cat
Dedicated to owl watching.
What a fat cat she was,
A capitalist cat,
Possessing her assets.
Round with fur floating,
All aerated.
Milky green eyes between the leaves,
Ovals of lime.
Blinking her thoughts into the spirals
Of her cute cat brain.
Her name is Enigma.
Come, Enigma, come down to earth!
Condescend.
Lap with your sly cat tongue
The pale milk waiting.
Due tribute to your beauty,
Your restrained, self-serving, independent, domineering
Affection.

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Aileen O’Carroll @aaocarroll.bsky.social · 23/12/2023

A Moment In Callan Before Christmas by Harriet O’Carroll

MOMENT IN CALLAN BEFORE CHRISTMAS
We drove from Dublin for the funeral
Through clear air.
Bright fields in chilly sunshine.
The straight road to Kilkenny cutting through Luxurious land. Trees and grasses grew tall
And hedges were thick with complex life, even in winter.
All that met our eyes was pleasing, rich and generous.
It was the day approaching Christmas Eve.
Small towns had slung lights,
Brave and festive.
But yet, we drove to a funeral.
We made our way
To that final boundary,
Reminder of limits
En route to pay our dues,
Dues of affection,
Dues of memory to a man now gone.
He was resurrected in our conversation,
The shaping of his shadow, His life recalled,
Dates located for his rites of passage, Marriage, fatherhood, widowhood
Now death.
The presenter's voice on the car radio
Spoke of today.

Weather and jobs,
Political movements
While we constructed a history.
Pooling memories to fill the cup, The closed timeline of a life.
And on the patterned carpet of our minds lay the pictures of those objects
Which we could still see and sense and he could not.
The furniture of life, the blue sheath of our flattened globe, The white moon and golden sun, a universe
Infinite and minute, earth, atom, light and darkness,
A world with us in it,
One universe among many.
We sat in the small church
Admiring fresh paint on old stones
Recognising childhood faces,
Cousin, neighbour, uncle, aunt
Older now than when last met,
All of us paying time's toll.
Hand gripped hand in greeting
Drawing each other back
To a time when our world was a garden And it was possible to believe That in the same frost-crusted night
A magic child was born and as a consequence
A cheery bearded saint delivered gifts to every child on earth.
For evermore.

Old rites were ready with their consolations
Hopes of a Heaven with ornate saints, Promises, conjuring faith, predicting reunion
Blessings and incense.
White candles, green vestments, gold chalice The angular coffin under its tribute flowers.
His life was rooted in these fields.
He was an expert in the detail of things local
A reader of history, a thoughtful man, A family man mourned by two daughters.
A friendly man, comfortable in company.
Not solitary.
Until now.
As we, the living, turned away,
Unable to do more for him,
We took those final parting footsteps,
And left him to his separate peace under the brown earth In Newtown Cemetery.
Driving back to our lives
Our thoughts were slow to relinquish
Those places, the people, Kells, Callan, Kilkenny Percy, Kathleen, Joan, Siobhan Bridie, Jerry, Phillie, Nick
Slices of a long litany.

We stopped in Callan.
The main street still sloped to the river, The Abbey and the Well stood as remembered Only the small shops changed as people Left and people came and life rolled on.
Looking for coffee, lost in the supermarket Chilly and distracted, searched the aisles
Suddenly, shopping ceased.
Wire baskets hit the floor
And voices rose in tune.
Among the yogurts and the Tayto crisps, Around the melons and the Farmhouse bread
Floated familiar melodies.
A Christmas Choir was singing the old story.
This sweet invasion gave us pause,
Held us still and listening. Smiles came and spread,
Eyes met eyes in capsules of friendship, The cold air warmed.
Music and hope
Being itself, needed no justification,
Like Happiness.

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