Learning on ScreenPararchive: Open Access Community Storytelling and the Digital Archive
Methodology
Currently, we are working together with a technology partner (www.carbonimagineering.com/) and four community groups (Brandanii Archaeology and Heritage (Bute) (www.discoverbutearchaeology.co.uk/), Ceramic City Stories (Stoke-on-Trent) (http://ceramiccitystories.org/about), Bokeh_Yeah! (www.facebook.com/BokehYeah), and Arduino MCR (Manchester) (www.facebook.com/ArduinoMCR) through technology lab workshops which take place every four to six weeks on average. Here, community group members draw on, add to and curate resources around shared cultural, historical and thematic interests and affinities drawn from a wider number of platforms and institutional sites to tell their stories. Initial workshops were designed in such a way that conversations and activities happened ‘offline’ in order to solely focus on members’ research story interests and to identify any possible connections between these without the distraction from digital gadgets. Some of the emergent and recurring themes revolve around archaeology, farming, conservation of natural resources and landscapes, wildlife, urban greening, history of family work and the creative industries, activism, young people and pottery, reminiscence and memory, digital and music heritage, and the exploration and digitisation of archives.
Fiona Philip behind the Scenes at the National Media Museum, Bradford
Members utilised workshops to ask questions. The two most frequently asked questions were: how did the other community groups become involved with Pararchive and how real was the possibility of obtaining access to institutional archives? Members learnt that the other community groups on the project came on board as a result of two aspects: existing and new links made by Simon Popple and their distinctive research interests. Regarding access to the archives of our institutional partners, we explained that our partners were keen to open up the cultural assets in their archives to community groups that can use their knowledge and expertise to add value to such assets in order to ensure their on-going relevance, and that Pararchive was an experiment towards achieving this goal. We pointed out that Pararchive was not just about searching archives and repurposing archival material to tell stories, but that it was also about feeding back on members’ experiences, something that would contribute to the creation of knowledge beneficial to others. Indeed, the starting point for Pararchive is the realisation of the difficulty of searching institutional archives, often exacerbated by interfaces that are too complex to work with, thereby putting a barrier between archives and users.
