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This chapter explores the use of a practice-led research methodology in the design of generative data visualisations that can be used to record and reveal the details of an empiric museum visit. The object of capturing this visitor information is to assist in the future design and development of tools for the creation of interactive museum experiences that can be improved by connecting the physical dimension of museums and exhibitions with digital information in new and novel ways. The main concern in this research is with how user engagement in the museum can be captured, visualised, and represented back to a visitor, museum curator, or the broader community in a way that might bring added value or insight. Moreover, the capturing of the visitor experience becomes an archival process and practice. It can be used in the design of future exhibitions, and more fundamentally to inform thinking around the ongoing ontological and epistemological position of the museum.
This chapter discusses the ‘virtual archives’ of community spaces and their potentials for collaborative, community-based knowledge production. It evaluates and problematises concepts of virtual archive engagement using a specific virtual archive project and a specific community as an illustrative case study. Experience Temple Works is a multisensory and participatory virtual archive of a Grade I listed building in South Leeds. It was intended to facilitate an analysis of the relationships between the vivid sensory experience of the building and the creative and cultural activities taking place within it. However, as this chapter attests, the project came to attain much greater social and academic impact through its later reconfiguration as a community-orientated platform for collaborative knowledge production. The overarching intention here is to explicate how new forms of virtual archive might challenge the power relationships historically associated with archives as privileged spaces of knowledge production, while simultaneously avoiding the many pitfalls associated with digitally mediated forms of experience and participation, both of which are well documented within the academic disciplines of new and digital media.
This chapter discusses the creation of the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus (BTCC), a searchable database of letters taken from the public archives of British Telecom (BT) that were written by nearly 400 authors on a wide variety of topics between 1853 and 1982. It first discusses some experiences working on the New Connections project, funded by Jisc (formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee) and a collaboration between Coventry University, BT Heritage, and The National Archives, focusing particularly on the methodological issues encountered. The corpus was created to address a gap in existing corpus resources, and so that researchers (primarily linguists) could access and, crucially, engage with the language of the letters. Since the completion of the BTCC there have been efforts to expand the corpus to include correspondence written to and from the Post Office, an institution with many historical links to BT. This chapter addresses issues surrounding institutional collaboration in both phases of this ongoing research.
This chapter takes the concept of ‘living heritage’ as a starting point to show the ways in which focusing on tangibility and intangibility, the formal and the informal, can be used to stretch the concepts of archival practice. It highlights the cultural and intellectual traditions, tangible and intangible, found within the Caribbean, Africa, and across the Diaspora. Accordingly, the institutions, organisations, concepts, and practices discussed here have a ‘pre-history’ both internationally and in the UK — a prehistory inseparable from the development of the intellectual and cultural history of African and Caribbean communities in the Diaspora. Despite this, an archival science capable of dealing with these complexities has yet to be developed. The chapter thus considers the ways in which Black-led archival practices in the UK have historically sought to both disrupt and define heritage practices. It makes a claim for the active, political and cultural incursions, disruptions, and interventions in the heritage sector by Black-led archives and heritage practitioners.
This chapter uses the Wellcome Library’s archive collecting around the treatment and experience of ‘mad people’ as a case study for exploring the opportunities and challenges that arise from mainstream attempts to introduce counter-narratives into the archive. The argument laid out in this chapter is based on observations at the Wellcome Library. It uses an auto-ethnographic approach, combined with in-depth interviews with Special Collections staff, to seek to understand perceptions and practice around collection development. In seeking to understand the representation of the treatment and experience of ‘mad people’ within the archives and manuscripts collections held by the Wellcome Library, the chapter focuses on madness from the 19th century to the present. It reveals that the most dominant and prevailing archival collection strength across this time period is focused on personal papers of eminent ‘psy’ experts (psychiatric specialists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, and related therapists).
This chapter explores the use of images from local history archives in the co-construction of short individual films with people with dementia. The study on which the chapter is based was carried out with two men and eight women living in a housing-with-care facility in the northern United Kingdom. The chapter finds that archive images quickly took on a central role in the film narratives of several of the participants. In the process, the archive materials themselves were also transformed, memorialising the everyday spaces and places in which the participants had lived. In this study, archive images were often used to elicit memories of people, or places that no longer look the same in the present day. The chapter reveals that such images were often more recognisable to the participants than were contemporary photographs. This corresponds with research into the ‘reminiscence bump’, which suggests that autobiographical memory for the period between about five and thirty years of age remains well preserved in people living with dementia.
This chapter reflect on the author’s experiences as the local partner lead for two University of Leeds-led projects. It explores what can be understood from them about the relationship between communities, digital heritage archives, institutions, and heritage engagement. Heritage (hi)stories, digital skills enhancement, and community empowerment are frequently cited ingredients in the mix of approaches to promoting community regeneration and development. Between October 2014 and March 2015, the two projects explored some of these themes with residents of the Isle of Bute, Scotland. Jointly, the projects brought together community, academic, institutional, and private sector partners to create new digital tools to support heritage-based community research and creative expression, and to further explore questions about heritage perception and digital engagement. Thus, this chapter discusses the meaningful contribution that projects such as Pararchive can make in the wider context of national ambitions for digitally engaged communities, and how project implementation might usefully be aligned with local communities in the future.
This chapter discusses the Inclusive Archive of Learning Disability History. It points to a collaborative relationship between the political ideas derived from public political logics — public service, public sphere, ‘on behalf of the public’ and for posterity — and those that derive from relational and personal-centred politics. Rather than favouring one or the other, the chapter argues that for an archive to be an archive, and for it to be an inclusive one, an approach to archival practice that held both the public and the relational political traditions in dialogue needed to be developed. Both political traditions have a history of being very effectively expressed in the learning disability self-advocacy movement as speaking up and being heard, and of arguing for services to start with the individual by being more ‘person-centered’. As such, the chapter reveals that the task of this archive is to explore fruitful combinations and collaborations between the two political traditions.
This chapter discusses effective ways to develop relationships between communities and museums around shared cultural agendas, practice, and knowledge exchange. Through the lens of an eight-month pilot that emerged from the Pararchive project and was partnered by the National Media Museum (NMeM), Bradford, the chapter addresses what it means to access a dormant but invaluable national archive and associative collections from the position of differently situated community groups. It highlights how the Pararchive–National Media Museum partnership (PNMeM) promoted opportunities for community groups to select, document, and creatively exploit archival resources in ways in which conventional museological practice and use do not allow. The chapter also outlines the key challenges encountered. In doing so, this chapter draws on detailed notes generated through participant observation, on the study of relevant documents and artefacts, and on important insights gained from audio recordings of relevant project meetings and an evaluative end-of-project workshop.
This chapter discusses the use of Digital Storytelling (DS) with older people. It looks at the benefits of participation in the DS process before considering how these self-representations — organised, selected and told by individuals and shared on their terms — can break down traditional bureaucratic power structures represented by the notion of ‘archive’. The chapter presents two case studies. The first is from Patient Voices, which curates and archives digital stories made under its auspices with the intention of transforming health and social care by conveying the voices of those not usually heard to a worldwide audience. The second is from DigiTales’s work with older people through the transnational action research project Silver Stories, which generated an archive of over 160 stories by older people and those who care for them, from five European countries. It shows how DS creates new possibilities for participatory and collaborative approaches to discovering and developing new knowledge, re-positioning participants as co-producers of knowledge and, potentially, as co-researchers.
