About the topic: This talk will present findings from a new survey of public attitudes about peace walls in Northern Ireland. In 1969, an Army Major who oversaw the construction of Northern Ireland’s first peace wall said: “This is a temporary measure…we do not want to see another Berlin wall situation in Western Europe…it will be gone by Christmas.” In 2013, the wall still remains and almost 100 additional walls and barriers now complement the original. A draft government report, leaked in January 2013, suggests that these peace walls should be brought down by 2022. Understanding public attitudes towards such a potential move is critical for both policy-makers and practitioners on the ground, and may help shape the formulation and implementation of future peace walls policies.

About the Speaker: Dr. Cathy Gormley-Heenan is the Director of the Institute for Research in Social Sciences at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. As a senior lecturer in public policy and politics, her research interests include the framing and reframing of policy issues, the politics of divided societies, state crime, and British and Irish politics. She is the author of Political Leadership and the Northern Ireland Peace Process, as well as a co-author of the edited volumes Teaching Politics and International Relations, and The Anglo-Irish Agreement, Rethinking Its Legacy. She serves on the editorial board of the journals Politics and State Crime and is a member of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council's Peer Review College. She also serves on the national executive committee of the UK's Political Studies Association (PSA). 

---Note: This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Department of History---

The scope of official secrecy is rapidly expanding. The sheer scale of the national security state, the growth of electronic media, and the power that still comes from compartmentalizing information means that the government is only releasing a tenth as many pages of classified information as it produces. Hundreds of millions of secret documents are piling up, raising doubts about how we will be able to reconstruct the past and ensure government accountability. But historians are now teaming up with data scientists to analyze the millions of documents that are being released. Since these were among the first official documents produced and stored on computers, we can use techniques like natural language processing and machine-learning. It may now be possible to make out the broad patterns of official secrecy, attribute authorship to anonymous documents, and perhaps even predict the content of redacted text. But the political and ethical questions remain: what does the public need to know, and when do they need to know it?

About the speaker: Matthew Connelly is professor of history at Columbia University. His publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002), and Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008). He has written research articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, The American Historical Review, The Review francaise d'histoire d'Outre-mer, and Past & Present. He has also published commentary on international affairs in The Atlantic Monthly, The Wilson Quarterly, and The National Interest. He directs the University Seminar on Big Data and Digital Scholarship, the dual masters program with the LSE in International and World History, and the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative, a research program on the history and future of planetary threats. He received his B.A. from Columbia (1990) and his Ph.D. from Yale (1998).