{"id":110,"date":"2013-07-09T13:19:18","date_gmt":"2013-07-09T13:19:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/?p=110"},"modified":"2013-07-09T13:19:18","modified_gmt":"2013-07-09T13:19:18","slug":"opening-up-the-archives-digitization-and-user-communities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/2013\/07\/09\/opening-up-the-archives-digitization-and-user-communities\/","title":{"rendered":"Opening up the Archives: Digitization and User Communities"},"content":{"rendered":"

This postgraduate training day was part of the AHRC-funded \u2018Going Digital\u2019 training programme for CHASE scholars \u2013 the Consortium for Humanities and the Arts South East England [http:\/\/www.uea.ac.uk\/hum\/gradschool\/news\/consortium-launch] \u2013 of which Kent is a member. We spent a fascinating day \u2018Opening Up the Archives\u2019 at Canterbury Cathedral \u2013 in the morning we discussed the day\u2019s key issues in the abstract, bringing together our different areas of knowledge about \u2018local\u2019 communities of users and the kinds of responses we wanted them to have to the material we digitized. We asked who we wanted communities of users to be \u2013 communities who are users, or users who become communities through their use of online materials? And what makes a local<\/i> community of users for a digital product \u2013 what is the nature of \u2018the local\u2019 on the internet? We discussed who non-academic archive users are, who they might become when the next wave of digitization has taken place, and why they might want to look at digital archives.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"Book\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After learning about Canterbury Cathedral Archive from its chief archivist, we discussed the DocExplore project which is a collaboration between the University of Kent\u2019s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies and School of Engineering and Digital Arts, the Cathedral Archive and the University and Library of Rouen [http:\/\/www.docexplore.eu\/]. It is an EU INTERREG IVa project that investigates computer-based access to and analysis of historical manuscripts. Above is the Canterbury manuscript on which we have been working \u2013 the seventeenth-century travel diaries of John Bargrave. We talked about the desire we had shared on this project, not only to widen access to and awareness of local archives, but also to extend engagement with them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Chat\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As we tried out the latest version of the software, we explored the way software design can define users and types of use of historical documents, and how a dialogue might be opened up between the work of academic and non-academic users. We also discussed my particular research interest \u2013 the material culture of digital humanities \u2013 asking how digitization might reflect not just the content of documents, but those documents as interactions between people and objects, with their marks of wear and tear, their size and shape, what they\u2019re written on and the way they are written \u2013 with erasures and interlineations for instance. Later on we looked at the tiny original document, and discussed what had been gained and what had been lost in the process of digitization.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"Heraldry\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After a demonstration of the DocExplore system and lunch in the gardens overlooking the Cathedral, we went into the cloisters where the Archives are housed. There, the students divided into groups to consider which communities of users a particular document or set of documents might appeal to, and how they would present them to those communities. The documents included a sixteenth-century diary, a set of court cases about will disputes and slanders, some town accounts and the remarkable commonplace book above, full of images of everything from fabulous beasts to coats of arms. The ideas for presentation included animated maps through which documents about different areas could be accessed, a Horrible Histories-type approach to the courts and their cases, ways of provoking curiosity about early modern spending such as totalling up money spent in inns, bringing together material about life-cycle and annual events \u2013 marriage and Christmas, and creating links across the commonplace book so that readers could take a route from mythical creatures to heraldry, or from coins to geography. Some documents, like accounts, worked well to open up whole periods and connect to key historical themes, whereas others worked in the opposite direction, needing a great deal of contextualisation to give audiences a way into the mind-set that created them. There was general agreement about the need to present documents in their entirety, but to create ways into and around them too \u2013 spatialised, visualised, peopled environments in which conversations about the archives could begin.<\/p>\n

Catherine Richardson, with thanks to Paolo Cardullo for the wonderful images [http:\/\/kiddingthecity.org\/blog].<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"Kilts\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We shared the precincts with the 5th<\/sup> Battalion the Royal regiment of Scotland who were parading there precincts with their weapons before their leaving service!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This postgraduate training day was part of the AHRC-funded \u2018Going Digital\u2019 training programme for CHASE scholars \u2013 the Consortium for Humanities and the Arts South … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5522,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5522"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions\/116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}