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In 2010 Fennell led an AHRC-funded multidisciplinary team developing new ways to analyse the digitised 1641 Irish Depositions corpus (AHRC-749-BF). The team developed an innovative collaborative research environment exchanging knowledge with IBM LanguageWare, Dublin, and modifying IBM's software to analyse variable, `dirty' data. Investigating evidential quality, language development and the language of violence and atrocity in 8000 witness statements, the research advanced a prior AHRC-IRCHSS-funded digitization project, creating novel interactions with an early modern corpus and generating new insights into the Catholic-Protestant divide in Ireland and the UK which impact on current behaviour, policy and historical memory.
Since 1993, the Visual Culture Research Centre has established an international reputation for interdisciplinary research. Historical, theoretical and practice-based research is applied in collaborations and partnerships with outside public-facing organisations, events, markets and professionals in the creative arts. This case study articulates significant social and cultural impacts epitomised by the exhibitions Weapons of Mass Communication 2007-8 and Archiving Place and Time 2009-10 and accompanying publications. The case study demonstrates how the researchers from within the unit have effectively engaged with the public, participants, practitioners, interpreters, writers, and critics to promote understanding of how images of conflict work: that they are neither natural nor real, but sites of contestation.