The modern cutting edge technological solutions available in the world of AR, 3D and binaural acoustic rendering provide an exciting pathway to bring the impact extent of our previous AHRC-based project onto the next level. Taking into account parameters of Ulster University's collaboration with the National Museums of Northern Ireland (NMNI) as partner organisation aligned to the University-wide and project specific confidential agreements, we aim to strengthen our partnership with NMNI and provide bespoke solutions to a number of problems they are currently facing, e.g. presentation and preservation of museum collections, as well as captivating and attracting new and diverse audiences educating them in local traditions and industries. It is also the mutual aim of this project and of NMNI maritime section to inform both national and international public in the vital importance of vernacular maritime tradition in cross-border cultural, economic and social contexts of the Irish Sea and Atlantic coast of Ireland, from Downpatrick to Giant's Causeway, from Rathlin to Donegal, enriching visitor experience in locations where vibrant maritime traditions of vernacular boat building and fishing existed in the 19th and 20th centuries. We propose to build an interactive mobile-based application for Android and iOS that will open these hitherto unknown locations in Ireland to international tourist visitors and local citizens. Reaching out to English and non-English speaking audiences, the application will be furnished with a multilingual interface. It will be free of charge for download at Ulster Transport Museum at Cultra (NMNI) and from App Store/Google Play Store. The application will provide a solution to navigating a highly sophisticated network of maritime locations along the Irish coast, simultaneously educating its users in the complexities of co-existence of man and sea, development of vernacular fishing industry and culture in Ireland from its growth in the 19th and decline in the 20thcentury, and the once rich tradition of stories and songs connected with certain place-names and landscape markers that come from our Stories of the Sea: Maritime Memorates in Ireland and Scotland collection, an outcome of our previous AHRC-funded project of which the present application is a follow-on. Within the framework of the proposed interactive application these personal narratives, ranging from 100 years, collected in various parts of Ireland, will provide an aural background to the locations under consideration, revealing a rich tapestry of themes, from stories of shipwrecks to near escapes, from talking seals to prophesying mermaids, from personal tragedies to anecdotal family happenings of comical nature. The application is based upon the mobile-operated prototype which we hope to fine-tune and expand within the framework of the present project. Building upon knowledge exchange with NMNI, an interactive application proposed by the project will test the potential application of ideas emerging from the research in different fields (heritage; AR; screen design; sound technology), establish academic knowledge exchange with the new user community (the museum sector practitioners), foster interactive public engagement, providing an innovative, engaging and emotionally captivating educational and recreational pathway for international visitors and local citizens alike.

The current application aims to enhance the exiting heritage science landscape of the UK, by leveraging globally unique capacities that coalesce at QUB. This will utilise our novel thermal decomposition-based carbon separation technique, to provide a bespoke dating facility addressing legacy issues for UK museum collections through RICHES, while also future-proofing the regional requirements of the heritage sector for Northern Ireland and its stakeholders. 14CHRONO at QUB is a globally recognised leader in heritage science. It currently forms a vital piece of the infrastructure for conservation, heritage and environmental sciences across the UK, but is particularly significant for Northern Ireland where it offers the only dedicated and all-island facility for this sector. Underpinning this significance is a £5.2m upgrade in 2021, which created the Institute for Heritage and Environmental Science (IHES). IHES has leveraged the distinguished history of 14CHRONO, alongside critical mass in analytical science at QUB, to deliver a core piece of infrastructure for fundamental research and access to heritage science and collections-based research in Northern Ireland and across the UK. Alongside 14CHRONO providing the only laboratory encompassing all forms of chronological modelling in a single facility in the UK (e.g. radiocarbon, dendrochronology, Pb210, and tephrochronology), the new, expanded capacities of IHES since 2021 provide a state-of-the-art suite of laboratories that deliver a first all-island facility for isotope geochemistry, materials characterisation, imaging, and environmental modelling in Northern Ireland. The present application crystallises these achievements by continuing to support regional and national partnerships with stakeholders and non-IRO statutory bodies in Northern Ireland. As such, this application will: (i) leverage these newly developed partnerships, capacities and experiences to future-proof the particular local needs of the regional sector in Northern Ireland (e.g. where logistics or fragility of collections prevent accessing facilities in GB) in partnership with the main regional stakeholder, National Museums Northern Ireland (NMNI); and (ii) harness these capacities to develop a globally leading-edge facility that combines the unique capacities and state-of-the-art capabilities of 14CHRONO and IHES to address UK-wide and globally relevant legacy conservation and dating issues facing museum collections and heritage professionals. Specifically, it will expand the application of novel approaches to radiocarbon dating and isotope geochemistry, through our recently established Ramped Pyroxidation/Combustion system (can switch between RPO and RC system) and MICADAS Accelerated Mass Spectrometer (AMS) gas interface capabilities, to integrate Micro-CT and evolved gas analysis. This will produce a globally unique facility with a specialism in chemical characterisation of 'problematic' elements within museum collections, capable of addressing legacy conservation histories, and tailoring treatment solutions. Similarly, it will cater for the basic capacity and access requirements of Northern Ireland's heritage sector, providing state-of-the-art facilities for analysis, conservation and research for user groups from within and without the region.

It has long been acknowledged that the development of science and the emergence of the modern city cannot be disentangled. For all that, much work remains to be done on the complex bundle of ties - cultural, political and practical - that bound these enterprises together. The proposed project will contribute to this task by examining the growth of scientific culture in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Belfast. At the beginning of the century Belfast was a small market town with a handful of citizens engaged in scientific pursuits. At the century's end it was Ireland's largest city and only industrial centre. By then science had become an integral part of Belfast's practical success and civic identity. This trajectory followed a trend evident in many other British urban centres. Belfast thus provides a little-studied exemplar of the co-evolution of Victorian science and the Victorian city. At the same time, a number of sharp contrasts can be drawn between Belfast and other Victorian cities. For that reason, focusing on Belfast also affords an opportunity to complicate general narratives about 'science and the city' in the nineteenth century and to explore aspects of Belfast's growth and development only superficially acknowledged in standard historical accounts of the town's unique history. The project will investigate science in Belfast from three distinct but related perspectives. First, it will examine the ways in which science was subsumed into Belfast's civic culture. From this viewpoint, the significance of science as a cultural activity and its relevance to questions of social status, cultural credibility and political advantage will be explored. Second, the project will examine the application of science to practical problems generated by rapid urban growth. Exploring the importance of applied science to urban governance will be central to this phase of the research. Third, the project will examine how science was used to link Belfast with a wider world. As well as mapping important scientific networks of exchange, this part of the research will explore the overlap between science, commerce and imperialism in what was, by the end of the nineteenth century, Ireland's busiest port city. In combination, these perspectives will provide a rich description of scientific culture in nineteenth-century Belfast and a multi-layered account of the relations between science and a modern industrial city.

The Bad Bridget Experience comprises five creative encounters. It centres around an innovative museum exhibition and immersive sensory installation at Ulster American Folk Park, an open-air National Museum NI museum in Omagh, County Tyrone. This is complemented by online content that brings aspects of the museum exhibition and installation, and original content, to an international audience. Alongside the online and in-situ encounters are an engaging and creative Education Programme aimed at teenagers, and a reflective and emotive Community Programme with female participants. The Bad Bridget Experience is based on the AHRC-funded research project, 'Bad Bridget': criminal and deviant Irish women in North America, 1838-1918. The Bad Bridget Experience brings the academic research to a wider public audience for the first time and conveys a more nuanced understanding of the Irish migrant who departed Irish shores than previously known. It presents a seldom told alternative to the 'American dream'. The project centres around emotions as a means to engage, educate and stimulate reflections. Visitors and participants will learn of the emotions of emigrants before their departure from Ireland, their hopes that they could make something of themselves in the new world, their sense of responsibility towards their families at home, and the economic desires of those who helped fund their passage abroad. It will explore disappointment experienced after migration. Poverty remained a feature of many Irish immigrants' lives. Having spent everything on the passage ticket and provisions, they had little on arrival. Life abroad presented new challenges including a very different climate and unfamiliar working and living environments. Job opportunities for girls and women were also limited and, as the academic research uncovered, treatment and conditions were heavily dependent on employers and circumstances. Migration was not unaffected by heartbreak. Partners, relatives and friends who promised to migrate never appeared. The migration of pregnant unmarried women shows that the concept of leaving Ireland to avoid the shame of pregnancy outside marriage predates the 20th century. Relationships also broke down abroad; our research shows that Irish women were the most likely migrant group to be deserted by their husbands. For much of the 19th century, infant mortality was also higher in Irish families than any other ethnic group. The loneliness, poverty and lack of support networks led to criminal and deviant behaviour, as made clear by heart-breaking statements of many of those who ended up in courts and prisons, which will be used to good effect as part of the Bad Bridget Experience. Irish migrants who left rural Ireland were thrust into urban America. The immersive sensory installation seeks to confront visitors with the sights, smells and sounds of 19th-century New York. While historical research to date has focused on chain migration, where one migrant assisted a relative or friend to travel abroad, our research reveals a more complex picture. Those who offered assistance were often in poor circumstances themselves, able only to offer a floor to sleep on for a few days rather than to facilitate a gradual acclimatisation to North America. The transient existence of many Irish immigrants also meant promises of assistance were not fulfilled because new arrivals could not track down contacts. Irish migrants also experienced judgement. Stereotyping and discrimination against the Irish presented challenges. The Bad Bridget Experience allows space for reflections on similarities between migration in the past and today. The research also showcases resilience, perseverance and determination, evident in Irish female migrant's survival strategies. Sometimes strategies were deviant or criminal, but not always, and the exhibition allows visitors to engage with the diversity of responses to opportunities and challenges in the 'New World'.

The political history of Ireland has long been interpreted through the lens of violent conflict. Over the course of several centuries, political relations within Ireland, and between Ireland and Britain, were marked by profound differences in national allegiance and religion, with politics, in turn, assuming a seemingly intractable character. But conflict in Ireland was not simply the result of primordial hatreds; it was sustained by clashing interpretations of contemporary political ideas about the nature of government. The American and French Revolutions, which helped transform the understanding of representation, propelled ideas of popular sovereignty and democracy into the political mainstream, revolutionising relations between states, nations and citizens across Europe. Ireland was certainly not immune from these wider international and intellectual trends. The Act of Union of 1800 created a multi-national parliamentary state. This settlement was then contested by generations of Irish political activists and thinkers who drew on the language of representative government in order to recast the terms of the British connection. The political frameworks that predominated in Ireland were underpinned by divergent conceptions of legitimacy, drawing on such ideas as democracy, popular sovereignty and historical continuity. Within each of the main ideological alternatives, the constitutional setup of the polity, together with its relationship to the seat of empire, was starkly different. The fundamental area of contention was the constitution of representative government. The sectarianism and violence unleashed in public life were symptoms rather than causes of this ideological antagonism. In exploring the hitherto uncharted terrain of political ideas in Ireland in the era of the Union, this project pioneers a new approach to Irish historical writing. The violence, instability and successive crises that marked the British-Irish connection remain the chief focus of existing historiography, yet this emphasis has deprived these disputes of all serious intellectual content. Above all it has obscured the significance of disagreements over the nature of representative government. Accordingly, this project breaks with a narrowly high political approach, which has tended to concentrate on the activities of the political elite, and examines instead the philosophical assumptions that underpinned the range of constitutional proposals from incorporating union to devolution and federalism. Political representation raised profound and all-encompassing issues. Consequently, the project explores its central theme across the political spectrum, from Tory notions of conditional unionism and contractarian allegiance, to the development of republican conceptualisations of the 'sovereign people'. Through an examination of the political thought of such figures as Henry Grattan, Arthur O'Connor, Thomas Addis Emmet, John Wilson Croker, Isaac Butt, Robert Holmes, John Mitchel, W. E. H. Lecky, Thaddeus O'Malley, Eoin MacNeill, Alice Stopford Green, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, and Patrick Pearse, the multiple meanings ascribed to representative government in the Ireland of the Union are thrown into sharp relief. The Union framed the political landscape for successive generations in Ireland across the long nineteenth century, forming the structure under which formal power was wielded. Ideas of representative government profoundly challenged the Union: much of the print culture after 1800 hosted an open-ended debate about the Union's legitimacy and legacy. Beginning with this material, it is possible to track debates across the entire period, and in the process investigate continuities and change in political vocabulary. In this way, this project will offer an intellectual history of the Union, and will therefore offer the first sustained study of political thought in Ireland during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.