The Data Stories team was involved in two events during the Maynooth University Research Week.
Maynooth Sparks 2025: Celebrating Early Career Research
This year’s Research Week featured Maynooth Sparks 2025, an inspiring event bringing together the university’s early career research community on Tuesday 21st October.
Behind the scenes, Maynooth postdoc liaison Juliette Davret worked closely with the event organisers, especially Noreen Lacey (from the Research Development Office – RDO), to coordinate the event. Juliette helped shape the panel discussion, bringing in Rob Kitchin to share his perspective on ERC funding and supervising a research team.
The morning began with a series of 6-minute talks in which postdocs showcased diverse research, from energy justice and cosmology simulations to language models and healthcare innovation.
The following panel discussion on “Funding opportunities & building research teams” was facilitated by Patrick Boyle (RDO) and featured expert insights from the following speakers:
- Eilish Lynch on career pathways
- Dr Abeer Eshra and Dr Niamh Wycherley on Research Ireland Pathway Experiences
- Dr Guilia Gaggioni on Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowships
- Prof Rob Kitchin on ERC funding and the supervisor’s perspective
The talks emphasised the importance of tailoring grant application to align with what the specific funder values, clearly articulating the intellectual contribution, feasibility and broader impact of the idea. A strong proposal not only presets a solid concept but also communicates its significance and potential payoff in accessible, compelling terms.
The event concluded with a networking lunch, allowing researchers to connect with colleagues and RDO staff – the perfect end to a morning of knowledge sharing and community building!
Daft.ie for Noobs: Gaming Ireland’s property market by spoofing property websites
On the Thursday of Research Week, members of the Data Stories team hosted a 1-hour interactive workshop titled Daft.ie for Noobs: Gaming Ireland’s Property Market by Spoofing Property Websites. The talk was informed by the work of Oliver Dawkins, Ella Harris, Carla Maria Kayanan and Hannah Mumby who are working on a research project called ‘Commodity Narratives’. The event offered a behind-the-scenes look at how this team of creatives and researchers have been collaborating to interrogate the following themes in relation to the housing crisis in Ireland: a) the commodification of housing, b) the role of capitalism in shaping housing desires (and futures), and c) the use of digital games as a medium testing assumptions and gaining better understanding of peoples lived experiences.
Prior to the workshop, the team sent a survey to participants inquiring into their personal housing journeys. Answers provided insight into frustrations that people deal with when navigating housing in Ireland. These insights also serve to inform the iterative process of website and game development and help to ensure that the work we produce is meaningful and relevant to an Irish audience.
Example question: What (if anything) feels absurd about navigating housing in Ireland?
The aim of the workshop was twofold. We wanted to introduce the work to the Maynooth University community, but we also hoped to test our work in progress to receive feedback. Starting with a short presentation, the team described how creative experiments — from data scraping to gamified website prototypes — seek to expose the absurdities embedded the property market and the logics that underpin it. Following the introduction, Olly showcased early technical experiments underpinning the spoof property site which is modelled on familiar sites like Daft.ie and MyHome.ie.
Participants were then invited to interact with our website, which was embedded with games and various hidden Easter eggs to find which satirise different aspects of Ireland’s property market. Links to pages which dump you on the Craigslist for shared rooms are just one example, mirroring the bitter experience of many student renters who are unable to secure more private accommodation.
The work is still in progress; including the research informing the webpage, design coherence and mechanics. We hope to deliver a website that sufficiently mirrors popular property websites in Ireland but that the user journey is slightly off, surprising and ultimately jarring so as to provoke reflection on the commodification of housing.
Of course, we also want site visitors to enjoy the satire and have fun!
To learn more about the early stages of the Commodity Narratives case study and the iterative creative process, visit the Data Stories website previous post: How do commodity narratives influence housing desires and life journeys?