Online cultural center?

January 9, 2015 1:38 PM

I have been toying with the idea of creating on online Irish-American cultural center, and need your ideas.

I'm thinking about something that would provide the same sort of things regional cultural centers provide -- education, community, etc. But nationally and digitally.

Does anything like this already exist (not just for Irish-Americans, but for any like-minded group), and I'm looking for existing models. If so, what works with these groups, what doesn't, and what might be attempted?

Also, what would you look for in such a group? Be as creative or as farfetched as you like.

posted by maxsparber to Society & Culture (5 answers total)

Asia Society happens to have a physical presence (two actually) but I think their website comes closest to what you're talking about. Possibly also Instituto Cervantes and Goethe House, although the latter two are more language heavy. I think many cultural centers and musuems are moving to expanded digital content to reach far-flung members so I'd think this is fairly common, although New York's Irish Arts Center doesn't have much digitally.
posted by TravellingCari at 2:09 PM on January 9, 2015

I would look for and recommend a section on the Irish language and learning Irish. You could include the 1961 Teach Yourself Irish text and audio, which the copyright holder (Hodder and Stoughton) has allowed to be published freely online. That text teaches the Munster dialect. I'd also have a bibliography of books and materials for learning standard Irish and the other two major dialects (Connemara and Ulster).

I have a better PDF and audio of the 1961 text if you are interested.
posted by Tanizaki at 2:27 PM on January 9, 2015

Recipes for Irish foods would be interesting (and delicious).
posted by Lycaste at 2:41 PM on January 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was going to say recipes too. Also, discussion of variations of all kinds across the communities of a diaspora in different countries always fascinates me.

A recurring feature could be reviews, or perhaps even a readers' discussion group, of novels set in Ireland.
posted by XMLicious at 3:52 PM on January 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

I feel like there are already a lot of Irish-American and Irish-expat sites that have a sort of a homey/schlocky bent, offering recipes or product orders from Ireland or collections of toasts or jokes or psuedohistories of your clan name and the like. I tend to avoid those and I think there are enough already. On the good side are things like Irish America magazine and its Facebook page, irishCentral.com, places like the Maine Irish Heritage Center, Irish-American Center of Chicago, etc. Those have more of an interesting mix of essays and interviews, performances, politics and news. I would like a cultural center that offered more of that.

In my mind, the central challenge would be defining audience - in terms of generation, position in the diaspora, and online entertainment habits generally. My mom and I enjoy different kinds of Irish-American-related content even though we share links occasionally. Personally, I like challenging, critical, and contemporary content that examines what it means to carry the marker 'Irish' in a time and a place where the concrete relationship to Ireland is in the pretty distant past, yet where I'm still subject to mores, habits of language of thought, and tastes that I can trace back a few generations. I'd like to be able to watch interviews with authors and musicians and activists and politicians from here and elsewhere in the diaspora. I'd like smart travel itineraries and suggestions. I'd like historical content, not of the generic/nostalgic kind, but scholarly, with some debate and controversy and upended narrative. I would especially like content telling individual stories of people who emigrated, where they landed, what they dealt with, and where their lives led from there - whether in the 1850s or today. The book discussion idea sounds great, as does movie discussion/reviews with a critical/thoughtful eye, and how about also drama and music. I'd also enjoy having some pieces that bring accuracy to myths - like, what do we really concretely know about the origins of cable knit patterns and Claddagh rings and other things that have accumulated a crust of souvenir-shop nostalgia about them? I'd like to know the real deal.

I do think the Asia Society is a good example (though they are extraordinarily well-funded and thus hard to imitate as a startup). They have a variety of programs outstanding for being very smart, and do a good job of staging events that draw a big audience and then re-deploying the result as online content across several channels.

This interesting thing popped up on Facebook this year and I don't fully undersatnd the mode, but it's called the New England Historical Society and basically just publishes interesting summary essays about things in New England History on its own site and on Facebook (it's not an actual society with meetings and officers, etc., that's just its name) . I like that it's a consistent presence and has a variety of content that's always interesting and pretty well written. Simple but now a regular part of my culture consumption,if you will.
posted by Miko at 6:11 PM on January 9, 2015 [6 favorites]