Animating Archives: Curating Small Research Data
A workshop at the University of Edinburgh
Room 3.15, 18 Buccleuch Place, University of Edinburgh
Wednesday 19 July 2017
A crucial challenge in the rapidly changing landscape of ‘data management’ is exciting the involvement of a wider range of researchers, and research data, than is currently the case. In particular, the focus on ‘big data’ and the computational possibilities of large datasets, has contributed to a sense for many qualitative researchers, or those working with smaller scale data sets, that these discussions are irrelevant for their own practice. Key concerns are that that the labour required to prepare data for deposit in a repository for possible future use by other researchers is ethically challenging, laborious, costly, unrewarding and of no real and meaningful benefit to the current researcher. This is exacerbated in a context where there is much enthusiasm for ‘data management’, but a lack of resource for supporting such work and a lack of recognition for those who take the time to engage in data archiving.
This workshop aims to articulate a necessary cultural shift towards practices of ‘animating archives’ (including realising the potential of emerging digital technologies), and away from narrowly construed notions of ‘data management’ and ‘data repositories’, which have arguably served to obfuscate the creative possibilities of working with data. Questions raised in the various debates around data management, data archiving, data curation, data repositories, cannot be solved by one discipline alone, and need the concerted involvement of researchers across the field of the social sciences and humanities as well as those involved in libraries, archives and various repositories. As the possibility and desirability of expanded archival practice becomes an issue of international relevance we see value in consolidating and extending learning in a UK context where the RCUK requirement to archive (since 1996) has stimulated activity. In particular we see the need to shift from a focus on the necessary challenges of doing this work to sharing examples of researchers collaborating to explore the creative possibilities of ‘animating archives’.
Organisers:
Niamh Moore (Edinburgh) and Rachel Thomson (Digital Humanities Laboratory, Sussex)
Contact:
Further Information:
This workshop is funded by a Dean’s Award from the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh.
Animating Archives: Curating Small Research Data
Programme
Room 3.15, 18 Buccleuch Place, University of Edinburgh
Map:
Wednesday 19 July 2017
9.30-10am / Registration and coffee10am / Introduction – Niamh Moore and Rachel Thomson
10.15 / Welcome
Professor Lydia Plowman, Dean of Research, College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
10.20-11.30 / The time/s of archiving
Rachel Thomson, University of Sussex
‘Revisiting and reanimating archives as materialising social change’
Liam Berriman, University of Sussex
‘Curating Childhoods: ethics, co-production and the archive’
James Baker, University of Sussex
‘Born-digital archives: state of play’
11.30-11.50 / Break
11.50-13.00 / Learning from community archiving
Niamh Moore, University of Edinburgh
‘DIY Academic Archiving: Learning from Community Archiving’
Sharon Webb, University of Sussex
‘Community Archives, preservation and practice’
Lucy Robinson, University of Sussex
‘Animating the Archive: DIY Digital Practice’
13.00-14.00 / Lunch
14.00-14.50 / Learning from other fields
14.50-15.00 / Break
15.00-16.00 / Mapping influences, challenges and opportunities – focussed collective discussion
16.00-16.15 / Close
Abstracts
Born-digital archives: state of play
James Baker (Dept History/ SHL University of Sussex)
Since the mid-1990s records have been created on computers in increasing volume. Within years, archives began to curate and preserve these ‘born-digital’ archives: word documents, photographs, web pages, email, software, whole operating that never existed in physical form. Today, as scholars in the historical humanities begin to research the 1990s, this archival work is beginning to make itself known outside of archival and preservation circles, not least because very few of these archives are available to use, locked up as they are in complex legal, ethical, and technological processes. In this talk I will introduce the current state of play in archiving and doing research with born-digital records. I will also suggest areas where there is space for us to intervene, such as moving the conversation away from scale - the primary pinch point for archives - to what we can learn from close curation.
Curating childhoods: ethics, co-production & the archive,
Liam Berriman (Education & Social work/ SHL University of Sussex)
This talk considers the importance for social scientists of ‘starting with the archive’ rather than seeing it as the destination for data. Against a backdrop of growing archive-based scholarship (Moore et al. 2016) and secondary data analysis (Bishop 2009), new ethical imperatives are emerging that require researchers to anticipate and plan for the continued life of a dataset after a project’s conclusion. This places a new set of responsibilities on the researcher to discuss and imagine with research participants how their data will be curated and what its potential future uses might be. Drawing on the recent Curating Childhoods project, this talk will share some reflections on ‘starting with the archive’ and collaboratively working with children and their families to co-produce a new ‘Everyday Childhoods’ data collection at the Mass Observation Archive. This talk will reflect on how children and their families engaged with this process and how their contributions shaped our understanding of the relationship between research and archival practice.
DIY academic archiving: The ethics, politics and practicalities of making open qualitative data
Niamh Moore, Edinburgh
This paper focuses on the creation of an open online archive of qualitative research data (see ) – drawing inspiration from community archiving. In the UK, the UKDA (and formerly as Qualidata) have led in supporting researchers in archiving research data, however it was always clear that ESDS Qualidata could not archive everything. More recently, many university libraries have been developing repositories for researchers to archive data (eg Edinburgh DataShare, a research data repository at the University of Edinburgh). However there are other possibilities. In this paper I draw on my experience of working with community archives to inform the creation of an online archive of research data (using omeka.org). This turn to DIY archiving is not a turn away from, that is against, these other initiatives, but rather a recognition of the need for multiple approaches to archiving research data, and a reminder of alternative archival histories and practices. Academics have much to learn from a wide popular interest in archiving, that is in creating knowledge, and long histories of community archiving and the UK and beyond. In particular I will focus on the ways in which the infrastructure of Omeka rearranges data and the relationships between data, allowing new relationships, juxtapositions and possibilities to emerge.
Animating the archive: DIY digital practice
Lucy Robinson (History University of Sussex)
This project combines two recent historiographical developments to challenge the relationship between the academy, the formal archive and DIY digital practices. This project takes the histories that subcultures and fan cultures tell themselves seriously, and argues that historians more widely could learn a lot from their practices. The first is recent work on subcultures and youth cultures, nationally, locally, across discipline and trans-nationally. The second is the increasing awareness of the significance of story telling and curatorship. This project combines both of these strands in order to reflect back on the possibilities of each for the other. How can DIY digital curatorship help us understand the cultural and political significance of youth and subcultures? How can an understanding of subcultures illuminate the politics of digital memory and DIY history writing?
Revisiting and reanimating archives as materialising social change
Rachel Thomson (Social work/ SHL University of Sussex)
In this presentation I conceptualise the archiving of social science data sets as part of a cycle of reanimation within which involves the collapse of temporal divisions between fieldwork/ analysis/ dissemination/ archiving and re-use. Focusing on research in the area of youth sexuality I consider how active engagement with and restaging of archive materials in the present is part of understanding how digital materialities remediate how we encounter and create social change/continuity nexus. The ideas explored in the presentation draw on and develop Thomson (2014) and McGeeney et al (forthcoming)
Community archives, preservation and practice
Sharon Webb (History/ SHL University of Sussex)
We are in the midst of an archival turn, one which is both digital, and community driven and orientated. This turn is a response to our online, digital environment and its affects on archival practice, as well as a response by communities, who use this platform, as a means to express identity, inform and challenge the dominate narrative, and indeed create it. Communities, self identified and self-acknowledged, are building physical and digital archives to represent their history and document current activities and actions. This activity creates and cements individual and community identity and provides cohesion and focus to group activity and work. In this respect, community archives are often autonomous - they are independent entities and are not attached to major or large memory institution, local archives, libraries or museums. Community archives are an integral part of our information eco-system and are vital to the balance of power between national control and censorship, and freedom of speech and expression. Community archives are, however, fragile and in some cases may be defined as at risk. This presentation will consider tensions between these community driven endeavours and their capacity to support projects in the long-term. It will ask what are our responsibilities as researchers to these archival projects. It will propose a research project to investigate community archives as both a new archival paradigm and a challenge to the term itself.
Background readings
Rachel:
McGeeney, E, Robinson, L, Thomson, R and Thurschwell, P (forthcoming) The cover version: researching sexuality through ventriloquism. In: Boyce, P, Cornwall, A, Frith, H, Harvey, L, Yingying, H and Morris, C (eds.) Sex and sexualities: reflections on methodology. Zed Publishing.
Thomson, R. (2014) ‘Possession: Research practice in the shadow of the archive’ in Smart, C., Hockey, J. and James, A. (eds) The craft of knowledge: experiences of living with data. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Liam:
Berriman, L. & Thomson, R. (2015) Curating Childhoods workshop report.
Will Davies
James:
National Archives. “Digital Strategy,” January 2017.
Reside, Doug. “‘LAST MODIFIED JANUARY 1996’: THE DIGITAL HISTORY OF RENT.” Theatre Survey 52, no. 02 (November 2011): 335–340. doi:10.1017/S0040557411000421.
Lucy:
Cofield, Laura, and Lucy Robinson. "‘The opposite of the band’: fangrrrling, feminism and sexual dissidence."Textual Practice30.6 (2016): 1071-1088.
Long, Paul, et al. "A labour of love: the affective archives of popular music culture." Archives and Records 38.1 (2017): 61-79.
Sharon:
Cook, T. 'Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms' in Archival Science (2013)
Niamh:
Moore, N. (2016) ‘Weaving an Archival Imaginary: Researching Community Archives’ in Moore, N., Salter, A., Stanley, L. and Tamboukou, M.,The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences, London: Routledge.
The Feminist Webs Collective, (2012)The Exciting Life of Being a Woman – A Handbook for Women and Girls, Bristol, HammerOn Press, 2012
LGBTYNW, ed., (2015) Prejudice and Pride: LGBT Activist Stories from Manchester and Beyond, Bristol, Hammeron Press