Carolann Madden

Dr Carolann Madden is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow funded by Taighde Éireann/Research Ireland. Her project, “Scenes from the West: Archiving and Interpreting the West of Ireland Through Early Home Movies, 1930-1970” looks at early, regional amateur filmmaking and home movies, and best practices for creating metadata for these films in various archival settings. It aims to understand the Irish West through its early amateur films, while also examining the history and implications of centralising cultural heritage objects and trying to find ways to better resource local organisations and groups who would like to maintain their own physical and digital A/V collections.

She has also recently been a Postdoctoral Research Associate at MU on the IRC/AHRC funded projects, “Women in Focus: Developing a Feminist Approach to Film Archive Metadata and Cataloguing” and “Empowering Archivists: Applying New Tools and Approaches for Better Representation of Women in Audio-Visual Collections,” both of which explored archival metadata and women’s early amateur filmmaking. Prior to this, Madden was a Fulbright Researcher at the University of Galway, researching early folklore collecting in the West of Ireland. A digital exhibit related to this research can be found at www.thiarwest.com. She is co-author of the Women in Focus Toolkit, and writes about amateur filmmaking and home movies in Ireland, Irish folklore and material culture, amateur film in the archive, the material culture of film, and archival metadata, absences and practices.