I have been involved in discussions before on the
interaction between academics and communities. Back in 2009 I took part in the
Sharing Knowledge symposium. I have also been involved in the issues of the
digital divide which flowed from previous involvement with the telephony
divide. Historical geographers at Newcastle University and telecoms access
specialists (e.g. Claire Milne in Public Utilities Access Forum, which I was
Secretary of, now Essential Services Access Network. were crucial in developing
that work (https://www.esan.org.uk/tag/digital-divide)
Digital debate on the long-18thC
Given the growing number of specialist historical
digital projects. e.g. the Old Bailey trials, and the London Electoral History 1700-1850, I tried to set up a roundtable
discussion about the topic for the British Society for 18thC Studies (BSECS)
Conference in January 2016. BSESC has an annual award to the best digital
history project at its Conference. The aim was to review:
(a) the
big projects to-date and what we are learning from them;
(b) what
needs to be done next. e.g. petitions to Parliament
(c)
the loss of material
generated by previous projects whose websites have been taken down. e.g. the
former Centre for Research into Freemasonry at Sheffield University
(d) non-academic
resources which contain 18thC material, e.g. North East Popular Politics
Project
(e ) dangers
on short-life of digital formats
I
was unable to identify people involved with projects who would be able to attend. The theme was picked up for the 2017
Conference with Stephen Gregg organising the Round
Table: The Future of Digital Humanities and BSECS and his participation in the
2018 Conference panel entitled Recovery and Reinvention in the Digital
Archives. I was unable to take part because it clashed with one of the other
panels I was involved in. I chaired an experimental session in which artist Ros
Martin presented and discussed the collaborative artist installation Daughters of Igbo Woman, comprising a
trilogy of digital films for the Georgian House Museum, Bristol.
Digital Humanities and Community EngagementBecause of this background, and because we have
previously worked together on the histories of black, Battersea and Wandsworth
freemasonry and friendly societies, Andrew Prescott invited me to take part in a
workshop on 18 April to examine issues involved in digital humanities and
community engagement.
- · How do we ensure equal partnerships between researcher and communities in developing shared projects?
- · What represents best practice?
- · What barriers prevent such partnership?
- · How do we ensure a diverse range of stakeholders and community partnerships in the development of digital services?
- · Are communities being excluded from digital possibilities?
- · What does a shared digital research community look like?
Andrew is Professor of Digital Humanities at Glasgow
University and Theme Leader Fellow for the AHRC’s Digital Transformations
strategic theme. He used to work for the British Library, and then ran the
Centre for Research into Freemasonry at Sheffield University. After he left
there the web site he set up with a mass of material was taken down by the
University. This is not an untypical story when funding ends. One of the stark
illustrations of this was a visual shown at the workshop of the British Library
web archive project which showed how much web material has disappeared. Andrew
has his own blog site at http://digitalriffs.blogspot.co.uk
The presentations at the workshop were extremely
wide ranging with Simon Popple from Leeds University talking about YARN and
Pararchive, Mark Cote and Jennifer Pybus from Kings College talking out their
work on how much data is collected about us as individuals, Christie Walker of
the Royal College of Art, Helena Byrne of the British Library web archiving
team, and Catherine Grout on the digital work of JISC, the not for-profit
company which support post-16 and higher education, and research, by providing
relevant and useful advice, digital resources and network and technology. Ruth
Gatlow of the Futurefield project based in Finsbury Park spoke about arts,
technology and social change online and in the Park.
Key Questions
The key questions being addressed were:
Sharing Knowledge
The
issues were similar to those at the 2009
Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Practice Knowledge
Transfer in the Arts and Humanities symposium in May 2009, and the many
debates I have been involved in over the years on ‘community engagement’. The
symposium was organised by the AHRC with
other partners as part of its work to encourage researchers to disseminate and
transfer their knowledge to areas beyond academia where it can make a
difference. ‘Arts and humanities subject domains have a huge
contribution to make to the economic, social and cultural life of the UK, so
one of the key elements of AHRC’s role
is to ensure UK businesses and other non- academic organisations can
benefit from the research it funds. One of the main ways the AHRC
does this is through Knowledge Transfer, the process in which knowledge is
co-produced through interactions between academic and non-academic individuals
and communities.’
Key concerns expressed at the workshop included:
The difficulty of defining ‘community’.
The banality of a lot of ‘community engagement
’techniques.
Problems with who in the community is able to take
part given the time and costs involved.
The digital divide.
The way real life changes people’s involvements in
projects.
Suspicion of academic researchers given past
experiences.
Finding out about what ’community’ needs are.
The importance of objects that can be handled,
rather than digital images.
Institutional, research and funding problems
within Universities.
The problems of funding allocation decisions.
The need for funding for archives to complete
digitising their catalogues and complete the listing of uncatalogued material
so that existing paper archives are more publicly known about and accessible.
The loss of digital archive material as websites
are replaced e.g. when Government Departments and Quangos are shut down or have
their names changed. Fortunately after the Museums, Libraries & Archives
Council was wound up, The National Archives took over its resources, including
the useful report of the Archives Task Force,
Listening to the Past, Speaking to the Future.
It occurred to me after the workshop that a major
problem in both academia and community is the continual changes of personnel,
re-structuring, funding criteria and the disruption that follows to network
connections. There is a danger of constantly seeking to re-invent the wheel. That also was something that struck me during the Alymer Seminar.
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