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OHD_PRS_0301 Swimming through Treacle

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So today im going to talk about designing in GLAM, by telling you about my experience designing in the national trust. Which I have illustrated with this can of treacle. And this is because one of my national trust supervisors described trying to basically get anything done in the trust as swimming through treacle. And it feels like it encapsulates my experience of designing in the trust.

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To give you an idea of what I mean. I’ll show you my initial project plan I made right at the beginning of my phd.

So quick bit of CONTEXT my phd was developed off the back of the final project I did for my masters in multidisciplinary innovation. The task for the project was create an oral history project at Seaton Delaval hall and one of our conclusions was this archiving of oral history thing, you could make a phd out of it. And so we did. And I was going to look at creating something that specifically allow visitors to reuse oral histories on heritage sites. So in my mind this was likely to be some kind of sexy software that would just be so sleek and amazing that all oral histories problems would be solved. And this was my original plan on how I was going to do this is this. Now pretty much everything about this is wrong. Firstly because it is three years instead of four years, it does not include any of the placements I did. But also the entire process just did not or could not happen.

[UNPACK PROJECT PLAN]

I did realise that the usual iterative testing process is just not really possible because but I could never properly test them.

The only example I can give of iterative testing is with my own archive. But this has nothing to do with the working with GLAM bit.

 I did give prototyping a try and although I did not test them.

However I thought the lack of testing told me a lot about the design environment.

I could not test the ghost boxes because they did not know what material to give me to test this with nor did they have the space for it, and most importantly they did not want to make any promises. The sound box could not be tested bc you are not allowed to have external tech in Nt and what oral history was I going to possibly use. The transcription ribbon was also one that could not tested because what laptop would that work on. So the lack of testing was not a complete failure in the end.

But I still need a new approach which I found after I looked at previous attempts at making oral histories more reusable. There have been a collection of attempts to make oral history more reusable. And most of them have failed ish. It is weirdly hard to do research into this because people did not really write a lot about when things failed. They publish papers on the super new tech and then they just disappear. Luckily there is one book that does talk about some failures.  Boyd quote, VOAHA and stories matter

These all failed because people did not think about the maintenance of the work. And if we look at my prototypes you see the same issue. What these prototypes told me and the various attempts at making oral history more reusable. Was that it is not about what you make but about how you maintain it.

 Which is how I get to Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Is a maintenance artist. She wrote a manifesto for maintenance art. Where she wrote the line “after the revolution who’s going to pick up the garbage Monday morning? I remember seeing her work during my time in art school and absolutely loving at the time but I had forgotten about it until it was mentioned by The British Library oral history archivist Charlie Morgan, who used this quote in a blog post about all the recordings that were made during the pandemic and how someone is going to have to archive these someone is going to have the clean up after the revolution.

So from this I wrote a manifesto for maintenance design, which I had totally forgotten I had written. So ukeles spilts the world into two systems in her manifesto the development system and the maintenance system, which she labels the death instinct and the life instinct. In terms of maintenance design I have put under the death instinct is that this is about drive by collaboration and the life instinct is simply life goes on. The designer is only a visitor to this space.

– labour

– limited resources (which also basically include labour. And I. Think that is also why I connected it to earth maintenance and looking after the planet)

So I decided to work through the lens of maintenance. but maintenance as a thing is really annoying because it is really hard to see if you are not part of it. IF you look t people who write about maintenance or infrastructure like Susan Leigh star a recurring theme is that you cannot see the value of maintenance until it breaks down. So my idea was that I would probably have to get very close to the situation in order to try and understand and map out the maintenance in these heritage sites, archives and look at how oral history needs to be maintained.

And this is how we get to Action research as a design strategy but while action research is normally the researcher going in and working with the stakeholders, but really what I did was work for the stakeholders. I literally went in and was like what do you want me to do. I have these skills how would like to use them.  And so they would give me a task to do and then I would bring it back to them for feedback and they would yes no no no no yes maybe, not yet. In the reflective practitioner Schon compares being a reflective practitioner to what jazz musicians do, as they make it up and go with the flow. And that is very much what I had to do because no one tells what you need to know, either because they do not know or more often they simply do not have the time.  I could have rocked up with my cute little sound box, they could not care less. They are thinking about the car park and whether the cafe has enough stock. You know how I found out the issues of IT at the national trust, my lovely supervisor was like you are tech could you sort this out and it was a nightmare. I then told the IT guy and he was like I’m gong to pretend I did not here you say that. You have to think on your feet the entire time and by working with or for them you can start building a better idea of the space you are designing in.

So action research was my strategy and under that came all these different case studies I was able bc my funding body is like go do placements. So what did I actually learn on these placements, well firstly my phd was going to be super unsexy.  

– Seaton Delaval Hall:

research room design:

leaving room for change:

working with maintenance, leaving room for the stakeholders to make their own changes. It is about setting up a framework.

– NCBS: policy development: takedown policy and sensitivity check doc: have to really thorough think about what we mean by archiving: understand what GLAM does

– bl: audits: what can history tell us: working with change

So I learnt some good things while on these placements

– working with maintenance is allowing room for the existing structure to absorb your work by offering a framework not dictating a single solution.

– what GLAM does. It collects people’s property and thats complicated

– things changes and this effects how we maintain. So although I am focused on maintenance I also recognise that maintenance has to move with the times otherwise it breakdowns down and we working to restore not maintain.

But what do I say if someone comes up to me and is like “how do I design in GLAM?” How do I swim through the treacle?

Well I can tell you what GLAM does.

1. It collects peoples stuff. It collects people’s property. It might be something they own or something they made. and there are laws, ethics, and cultural customs that are around this you cannot forget. Also they might change and vary between countries.

It does two things with this stuff. It keep it and it curates it. how long something is kept can vary from whenever an exhibition is finished to forever either way however long it is kept it must be maintain and safe. How it curates it is also deeply political and never truly objective.

So if this is the why and what. The how is creating the balance between creation/collection/development and maintenance. Or more simply said Change and stability.

First It is about spreading the resources you have other these two spaces. NCBS

And the second is to one big ol’ theory of change or risk assessment.

OHD_PRS_0300 Iraq Symposium talk

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Archiving and Reusing oral History – a wicked problemDownload

The archiving and reusing of oral history is often dubbed “the deep dark secret” of oral history, because a significant amount of recordings once they have enter long-term storage are not used again. Investigating this issue and trying to come up with solutions has been central to my PhD research, and so I thought it would be helpful to your endeavour if I were to take you through some of my findings. 

The first thing you need to know about archiving and reusing oral history is that it is a multidimensional problem. In design this is often referred to as a “wicked problem”, a term coined by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in their 1973 paper titled, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. The term ‘wicked’ is not in reference to the ethical standing of the problems, but is used to capture the difficult nature of the issue, how it is malignant, vicious, tricky, and aggressive. The area of concern is dynamic and interconnected in ways which makes it hard to create a single perfect solution. It is for this reason some designers prefer to use “situation” and “opportunity” instead of “problem” and “solution” as a way to communicate the continual and reflective work that needs to happen when dealing with such complicated situations as the archiving and reuse of oral history recordings. So why am I telling you what a difficult issue archiving oral history is? Well because setting up an oral history programme will require the storing of recording long-term or short-term and as this “deep dark secret” of oral history is something you are guaranteed to come up against and not recognising the complexity of this wicked problem can as Rittel and Webber write could be morally objectionable. 

However, you have one distinct advantage when tackling this issue of oral history archiving and reuse – you are not starting form scratch. There have been many attempts to solve the deep dark secret of oral history, some more successful than others which is excellent news as the design theorist Victor Papanek writes, “The history of progress is littered with experimental failures.”. 

So to quickly summarise:

  1. This issue of oral history archiving and reuse is a difficult, multidimensional, and dynamic situation
  2. There is a long history which we can learn from

Now as I said there are many dimensions on this situation but through my research I have found some general areas which at good starting points for your consideration: technology, ethics, labour, and money. I am going to quickly explain each of these and show how they are interconnected. 

I am starting with technology because this is the area which often hogs all the attention, which is not surprising, we like the technological fix, it’s sci-fi, it’s the future, it’s a bit magic. But its magic is an illusion, as Willem Schneider acknowledges in his reflection on the oral history reuse technology Project Jukebox. Technology on its own will not solve the wicked problem of oral history reuse. This is generally for two reasons:

  1. Firstly it is constantly and rapidly evolving, and tech companies have built obsolescence into their product making technology not a particular stable area which is not helpful when you are setting up an archive or any form of long-term digital storage.
  2. In addition, the digital world exists as a web of interconnecting systems. Your laptop is made by one company while your software is made by another, and there is another completely different organisation running the internet. If anything happens to one of these systems it is likely to have a ripple effect across the entire networks of interconnected systems. Again this is not a stable environment for long-term storage. 

The big lessons we can learn from historical failures are how technology is not the single route to solving the issue and how its unstable nature is one of the greater challenges of this endeavour. 

However, technology is also where some of the most interesting opportunities lie. This oral history archive will be created in a post-AI world and therefore will be able to explore how this will affect archives. There is also an increasing awareness of the environmental effects of long-term digital storage and how this is a pressing issue in the age of data. 

Next section – Ethics. I have done three different placements for my PhD and in during all of them I was trying to make archival material reusable. I spent those six months not thinking about technology but working on either copyright, data protection, or sensitivity checks. When you are working with oral histories you are dealing with people’s lives, permissions and restrictions have to be in place in order to make it available. And ethics like technology is also always changing. Copyright in the form we know it now was heavily influence by the rise of the internet in the late 20th century. The various data protections laws have only become a thing in the last ten years and definitely will be changing as attitudes change. In addition to this what language and images are deemed socially acceptable is also always changing. The constant evolution of ethics is both a practical challenge and a fantastic research opportunity as this endeavour is working on a very large scale and is a relatively a new geographic area for oral history to be deployed. It is likely setting up the ethics for this project will deliver some new insights into the ethics of oral history archiving in general. 

One of my central conclusion of my PhD is how labour, specifically maintenance labour, is critical to successful innovation in this area. Both the areas of technology and ethics will require maintenance labour because they are these continually evolving areas. When we look at some historical attempts to solve this issue we see that some of the technological solutions fail because they did not account for the maintenance it would require to keep the technology. In the case of ethics evolving, one of placements during my PhD required me to do a copyright audit of a large collection. It turn out that out of 1700 recordings only 400 had the correct copyright, meaning that 1300 recordings were not reusable. This likely happened because no one had checked whether these recordings had the right copyright permissions until I came along. In both instances maintenance and the labour it takes to keep long-time storage was not considered and therefore the innovation collapsed or requires a significant amount of restoration. Restoration is only necessary when maintenance fails. In How Buildings Learn Stuart Brand quotes John Ruskin, “Take proper care of your monuments, and you will not need to restore them. Watch an old building with an anxious care, guard as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation.” This endeavour has the great opportunity to explore methods on how to sustain and maintain innovations, by putting labour in a central position. It can give us insights into how organisation are sustained through institutional memory and create ideas on how technology and humans can synthesise their respective abilities to create better long term storage for archival material. 

Appropriately the overarching area of tension in this complex issue of oral history archiving and reuse is money. If we look at the history of technology driven solution which failed, many eventually collapsed because people were not maintaining it and people were not maintaining it because they were not getting paid. When the money runs out the work stops and it collapses. And therefore you need to know the budget and consider the long-term requirements of running and maintaining an archive. Here again is an opportunity to develop new forms of spending plans that both encourage innovation and support maintenance, something which currently is not standard practice. 

So these four areas are the key starting points to the identifying opportunities to improve the situation around oral history archiving and reuse. Now it is important to note that these are just starting points and each version of the oral history archiving and reuse situation will be different to the next one. Archiving oral history recordings as an small community base project in the country side of England is a different situation to this project and therefore will likely render different opportunities. This is especially the case when you consider how oral history is or be will value within its particular setting. How we value history and historical material will influence how the material is archived and reused. There are many examples with oral history’s legacy where you can clearly see value has shape the project. Certain topics are considered more valuable than others in certain cultures. For example in Europe and the USA the holocaust and the world wars are popular topics for oral history projects. These very intense and heavy topics will bring different ethical issues than lighter topics. Some oral historian’s prefer video recordings over audio recording, another expression of value which will shape the collection. You also have differences in how oral history is valued in relation to other historical materials. Maybe someone uses a photograph in their interview or wishes to record on location, again this will change the set up of collection. All of these decisions will effect what technology might be used, what the ethic forms need to look like, what work needs to be done, where the money can come from. This project needs to understand what it values and how this might shape the project but also how these values might change and how the system will accommodate these changes in value. 

The issue of oral history archiving and reuse is not a banal, tame problem. It is a wicked problem – a mess. But it is also an area of great opportunity where great innovation and insights can be discovered if we do not tame the wicked problem but instead seek to identify opportunities which can improve the situation of oral history archiving and reuse for everyone. 

OHD_PRS_0265 Reusing oral history in GLAM: a wicked problem

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OHS conference 2023Download

My PhD or CDA, collaborative doctoral award is about reusing oral history recordings within GLAM, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. I am using the National Trust property Seaton Delaval Hall, as a case study.  Now for context my background is in Art and Design. I did Fine Art at undergrad and then moved into design, specifically innovation and system design. And so when it comes to the infamous issue of reusing oral histories I approach it from the perspective of a designer. This has led me to frame the issue as a “wicked problem”. The term “Wicked problem” comes from a paper titled, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, written by a Professor of the Science of Design, Horst Rittel and a Professor of City Planning Melvin Webber in 1973. And the term has been adopted by innovators and designers because this paper is about problem solving and the act of design is basically problem solving. In the paper Rittel and Webber specifically discuss two types of problem solving: “tame and benign” problems and “wicked problems”. Tame, benign or scientific problems are simple. They are easy to define and have one simple solution. It is a very linear process: define problem, solve problem. A wicked problem is exactly the opposite. They are extremely difficult to define and coming up with one simple solution is close to impossible. And the process of solving a wicked problem is not linear at all. Defining the problem and creating solutions often happen at the same time in a kind of back forth manner. You make an initial definition of your problem and create a solution to that problem and then the testing of a solution reveals another part of the problem. So you go back to your problem definition and tweak it, and then think of another solution and it repeats. In fact, as Rittel and Webber write this process could go on forever since a wicked problem will forever keep evolving as the world changes. You can therefore never truly solve a wicked problem but only pick various interim solutions which are not perfect but will cause the least damage. And to keep creating these interim solutions you need collaboration because a single person could not possibly understand all the evolutions in the wicked problem, all the different angles, all the different stakeholders.

Therefore my project is a Collaborative Doctoral Award for a really good reason. I have benefitted greatly from being in collaboration with the National Trust because I got access to a huge variety of people who I could work with in order to build a better understanding of the problem definition and any potential solutions. And over the nearly three years I have been working on this project I have been able to expand the definition of the oral history reuse in GLAM problem. It is extremely complicated, and the specifics of my case study will not be the same as all GLAM institutions. As trait seven of wicked problem goes “every wicked problem is essentially unique”. But I have found five recurring areas of wickedness, which most GLAM institutions will have to deal with when tackling the reuse of oral history recordings: technology, labour (specially maintenance labour), money, ethics and law, and value. In order for an organisation to start understanding the wicked problem of oral history reuse and start creating solution, there needs to be a collaboration between the people who work within these five areas. Within each unique institution there will definitely be other areas and other people that need to be brought to the table but it is these five areas and the people who work in them which make up the foundation of solving the wicked problem of oral history reuse.

I am going to start with technology because this is the area which often hogs all the attention, which is not surprising, we like the technological fix, it’s sci-fi, it’s the future, it’s a bit magic. But its magic is an illusion, as Willem Schneider acknowledges in his reflection on the oral history reuse technology Project Jukebox[1]. Technology on its own will not solve the wicked problem of oral history reuse. Obsolescence has be built into technology in a near aggressive way. So while you can recruit a software engineer at the start your project to develop your technology, you are going to need someone who is able to maintain the technology when obsolescence kicks in. The area of technology is therefore completely intertwined with the area of labour, specifically maintenance labour. Maintaining a technology is not easy and the more complex a technology, the harder it is the maintain, and the more specialised person you need to hire to maintain it.

So when we think about the technology we are going to use to tackle our wicked problem, we need to always be thinking about the labour needed to maintain it. We need to collaborate with those who will maintain it and not be seduced by magic of complex technology. Because while we now have complex AI technology like ChatGPT, I can tell you from experience, and I am sure many of you can relate, in the National Trust you are using a landline to organise interview dates and posting transcripts and consent forms by snail mail. As the historian David Edgerton writes in his book The Shock of the old we should not measure technology through innovations but rather use. In which case Excel and Word are still king of the technologies.

So the technology used to help create a solution to the wicked problem of oral history reuse has to be proportional to the skills of the person maintaining it, which is why you collaborate with them. But that person and their skills will need to be paid for and so you need to talk to the money people. Economic system you are working in will directly influence your technology, because the more complex the technology, the more expertise you need, the more likely it is things are going to be a little more on the expensive side. People with advanced technological skills are not cheep. They make a lot more money shooting down bugs all day in a monster tech organisation then being the IT person in the GLAM sector. And this is not just money for a set amount of time, this is labour needed to maintain an archival object – this goes on forever. So getting feedback from the money people on any solutions you are developing your solve your wicked problem, your particular case of “how do we make oral histories reusable within my institution?”, is invaluable because the truth is money does make the world go round. So recruiting them into your little collaboration crew is essential.

Now what I have talked about so far is basically the mechanics of oral history reuse. How you use an appropriate technology to get your oral history recording from A to B from a WAV file to useable, searchable interface and keep it there. But you cannot just simply just go from A to B with oral histories. I have done three different placements for my PhD and in during all of them I was trying to make archival material reusable. I spent those six months not thinking about technology but working on either copyright, data protection, or sensitivity checks. When you are working with oral histories you are dealing with people’s lives, permissions and restrictions have to be in place in order to make it available. Which is why alongside your tech developer, your maintainer, money people, you have to have your copyright team, your data protection team, and maybe some kind of ethical review team. And again, just like obsolescence in technology collaboration is crucial because ethics changes all the time. Copyright in the form we know it now was heavily influence by the internet, which is relatively young. GDPR was only implemented in 2018. And what language and images are deemed socially acceptable is always changing. The feedback you get from the ethics people to keep your ethics up to date is so important, because most institutions in the GLAM sector cannot really afford a lawsuit or scandal, so you need to get this right.

It is getting busy our collaboration crew but have one area of wickedness left, value, and this is where things start to get really sticky, because all I have talked about so far is about making reusable oral histories not about actually reusing them. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink. You can make your oral histories as reusable as you like but if people do not want to reuse oral histories they are not going to reuse, even if its easy to do. They have to see the value in reusing.

And this is where I mention trait 8 of wicked problems “Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem”. The difficulty of reusing oral histories is a symptom of the problem with how we value historical material. And how we value historical material is a wicked problem in itself because you can value things in so many different ways. The classic way is it monetary value. Within this frame oral histories are not going to fair to well against other historical items like chairs, paintings, original Beatles lyrics. In total I have seen the National Trust used eight different ways to value material:

Communal – The item represents a particular community.

Aesthetic importance – The item is deemed ‘aesthetically’ important or is from a famous artist.

Illustrative / historic – The item is illustrative of some historic moment.

Evidential – The item works as evidence to see how something was.

Supports Learning – The item is helpful in supporting learning found in the national curriculum.

Popular appeal – The item has mainstream appeal.

Cultural heritage significance – The item is significant to a specific culture.

Contextual Significance – The item gives important contextual information to a site, or a historical event

Materials also have international, national, regional or local value.

You can also flip the idea of value, how much is it going to cost to keep this item? This can again be measured several ways for example money and space, but also carbon. How much energy will it take to keep this item? Yep the reusing of oral history is an environmental issue.

Value is complicated and in order to get people to reuse oral histories we need to understand all the value oral histories can offer. We need to talk to curators, artists, educators, community workers, academics, all the potential different reusers and ask them what they find valuable. Why would they reuse oral history? And then we need to think about how we communicate this value. Do we go top down and work with policy makers to develop policy which makes it a requirement to reuse oral histories? Or do we work bottom up and try and nurture a culture of oral history reuse by teaching it more at a university level and creating projects based around reuse? Although whether a project based solely around reuse will get funding is another question, which brings us back to the money people and proves the wicked entanglement of it all.

This is not a banal, tame problem. It is a wicked problem – a mess. These five areas, well four overlapping` areas and a continent of complexity, are deeply intertwined and this is before we even start bringing in the unique elements of each individual institutions case of oral history reuse. And the only way to start detangling in some way without failing or being destructive is by collaborating and create a solution that will bring us a step closer to reusing oral history.

[1] “we stumbled onto digital technology for oral history under the false assumption that it would save us money and personnel in the long run.” (p. 19)

OHD_PRS_0259 Learning from ourselves : Reusing institutional oral

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We would like to start by quickly introducing our projects, as we will be using them to illustrate our methodologies. My project is with Seaton Delaval Hall, which is a National Trust heritage site in the North East of England. The land has been in the hands of the Delaval family since 1066 after the Norman conquest. The hall now standing on that land was completed in 1728, it partially burnt down in 1822, was restored after the Second World War and was then given to the National Trust in 2009. The National Trust, set up in 1895, is one of the biggest heritage and conservation charities in the UK and also one of its largest landowners. In a review done in 2020 the National Trust revealed that Seaton Delaval Hall amongst many other properties had connections with the slave trade and other colonial activities. My PhD is looking into how we can reuse oral history recordings on heritage sites and how heritage sites can benefit from reusing oral history recordings beyond the usual collecting of stories.

My project is at the Archives at NCBS which is a collecting centre for the history of science in India situated at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore. I want to study the processes of institutional policy making through the lens of gendered safety policies in scientific institutions. I hope to understand the various deliberations and considerations behind policy-making in different areas, through interviews with the stakeholders of institution policy – policy-makers, enforcers, students and staff. Some questions I hope to ask include specific concerns about safety that led to action from scientific institutions, how policy solutions were formulated, debated and enacted, the responses to these actions from persons on campus, and the corroboration and/or dissonance between anxieties of campus occupants and policy. I am aiming to learn more about gender discourses that informed policy, and the feedback to this discourse after their adoption into daily working.

The reason these projects have been brought together for this presentation is firstly due to convenience. We met at Archives at NCBS and then got talking about our projects, which revealed an overlap in our motives within our respective projects, which is reusing oral histories. In particular, we are approaching oral histories from the perspective of the archives. Moreover, while both of us are acting as independent observers, we are doing so on behalf of our respective institutions and our work is deeply embedded within them. Within this context – deeply tied to the institution and to the archive – we found that the  “oral history project” format, i.e. recording oral history and then turning it into a book or exhibition, does not fit the rhythm of either. The institution and the archive aim to work in perpetuity, while the oral history project is often tied to a single moment, and is distinctly linear and terminal. The “oral history project” format simply does not accommodate what we wish to do with institutional memory. So we propose a new method of approaching oral history projects cyclically by recording with the explicit intention of reuse by a different individual at a later date, and reusing with the explicit intention of connecting oral history projects to the history of doing history in the institution. But before we explain our new method we need to understand oral history’s relationship with institutional memory, what it offers as a tool to capture or perhaps not capture when it comes to institutional memory. 

In a 1986 paper on the use of history as an organisational resource, Omar El Sawy, Glenn Gomes and Manolete Gonzalez describe how institutional memory consists of semantic memory – or past learning that has been codified into procedures and processes – and episodic memory – defined by them as the unwritten memories within an organisation of a “repertoire of responses” to various situations that arise in the course of working, held as stories, myths, artefacts by individuals. Organisational or institutional memory – used interchangeably – is therefore defined as “…accumulated equity representing the beliefs and behaviours of organisational members both past and present cumulated over the life of the organisation”.

In our experience, archival records can allow us to trace the histories of policy deliberations. We can know when specific infrastructure, facilities, policies, and even laws were instituted. Through letters, meeting minutes, and personal records we may even find added context. What we lose is an implicit, often commonly understood discourse, that informs the creation and adoption of policies by members of the institution, based on different lived experiences inside and outside the institution over time – basically the intangible memory that El Sawy et. al. termed episodic.

On a basic level, oral histories work to simply fill gaps in knowledge in records –  for instance, at NCBS in the OH catalogue, in an interview with an architect who worked on the construction of the campus, one finds reference to an on-site stone crusher to make jelly for construction that caused the interviewee lung problems due to fine debris. They state that this experience led to the removal of on-site crushers in all future constructions. The memory of this event has been institutionalised as a standard process, without there being a push to preserve the memory itself. Similarly, at Seaton Delaval Hall, through oral history interviews Hannah found information on various maintenance and conservation jobs that had been done over the decades which had not been formally documented. She also found how the management styles of the various general managers of the hall have affected the relationship between the staff and the volunteers. This is particularly important in the National Trust because the sites rely heavily on volunteers to run the sites. 

But oral histories can also contain more abstract information. For instance, at Seaton Delaval Hall, the oral history interviews were able to capture historiography, so how people have talked about certain events over time. This is a possible helpful source to the running of heritage sites and how the staff might develop exhibitions and installations to either match or challenge people’s feelings around certain events or include material and stories which they prioritise or miss out. To give another example from the NCBS catalogue, several interviews refer to a sense of alienation felt between incoming students and the institution. These references can be found across students, faculty and staff, with differing personal explanations for this feeling from all quarters – whether it’s the question of open labs, the creation of departmental silos, or the changing priorities of the student body. This sort of documentation of ‘feeling’ is the unique advantage of oral history as a source – and gives vital information about the individual-institution relationship. 

So we fully champion oral history interviews as a way to capture institutional memory, but we need to remember one of the very important traits of institutional memory, which is how it is distinctly dynamic in nature. In a 2020 monograph, James Corbett argues how institutional memory is more than a collection of facts and figures, and even recollections of events and contexts – it is a narrative about the institution’s wider identity. This narrative Corbett discusses comes from Charlotte Linde’s 2009 monograph, Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. In it she defines institutional memory as “representations of the past” brought into the present by individuals. Because of the nature of the workplace institutional memory is dynamic, because representations of the past change with the people representing it, the purposes for which narratives are created, and the changing circumstances and shape of the institution itself. 

And this is where things start getting complicated, because as we established oral history is good at capturing institutional memory, but the format of the “oral history project” does not lend itself to preserving the dynamic nature of institutional memory. There are several reasons for this, the first being the well-known fact that no one reuses oral history recordings, it is in Michael Frisch’s words “the deep dark secret of oral history”. In reality this is not a secret but more like the very large bright pink elephant in the room no one wants to talk about. Oral history recordings rarely get reused when an oral history project ends, which is not why we record oral histories. One of the reasons we wish to record is because they capture the “missing” parts of history, which are important for an institution to reflect on its current trajectory. An example of an oral history project which focused on recording institutional memory but suffered the same fate as every other project was done by the United Nations. The UN did an oral history project titled The United Nations Intellectual History Project or UNIHP to investigate the history of ideas with the UN. It followed a similar format to any other oral history project with the knowledge found in the oral histories published into a several volume book series. Oral history itself is neither finite nor final, and projects like UNIHP – i.e. terminal project that ends by creating a heavy bulk of static knowledge –  build in redundancy by attempting to codify it without factoring in the inherent changeability of narratives in an operative institution. In a paper on UNIHP the reader is pointed toward a website www.unhistory.org, which now will bring you to a Japanese holding website. A further search only turns up a handful of articles and references to the book series. There is no evidence of the recordings being easily accessible today. Historians, like Portelli have discussed a long-time impulse to turn oral history into a written transcript before use, as a way to make such interviews an objective source – but we have far moved past the point where the legitimacy of oral history was in question. Our continued attachment to text-based outcomes has done injustice to the new possibilities offered by oral history.

Within our project we wanted to use oral history to capture institutional memory but the oral history project format misses the dynamism of memory which is so valuable to our understanding of the history of institutions. So we offer an alternative. Instead of the somewhat linear method of recording, making something, likely text-based, from those recordings and then leaving it in an archive to gather dust, we propose a continuous cycle between recording and reusing. In this cycle you record with the primary aim for it to be reused further down the line by someone else and you reuse with the aim to record new material based on what you found in the archived recordings. We believe this cycle can achieve a more integrated culture of oral history instead of having the occasional oral history project. We will take you through the stages more specifically with Hannah discussing how she has recorded oral histories with aim of reuse and then looking at how Soumya reused oral histories with the aim of recording.

Record for reuse

For my project with Seaton Delaval Hall I specifically approached my recording with the question – what will the people who will be reusing want from this? Of course there is no way to really know what they would want in the future. So instead of directly answering the question, I decided to get a better understanding of the community surrounding the hall, their hopes and dreams, and also make sure they knew about my work and what I have to offer by recording oral histories. How I did this materialised in two ways: integrating into the hall’s community and leaving behind as much of my findings as possible. 

I started off simple when integrating into the hall’s community by volunteering as a room guide. I then also did a three month placement where I helped them set up an onsite research room. When it came to recruiting for my oral history project I nearly always had the staff help me find candidates and I have always been transparent about who I am recording. I also started to ask the staff if they had any questions they would like put to the interviewees or whether they were looking to find out something about the history of the hall or the maintenance of the hall. For example, the gardener wanted to know the exact date the rose garden was planted which the old caretaker of the property could answer. I also have been able to work out the location of the old kitchen garden by recording people who had been at the property during the Second World War. I am not suggesting they would not have been able to find this information anywhere else but asking a human is often faster than searching through piles of archival material. I have also been able to capture the various ideas people had for raising money for the hall. These ideas could be helpful for any other property wishing to raise money if they wanted to know what worked and what did not. I hope that by being more visible and collaborating with the staff I make the value of oral history more visible and prove to them how it can help them in their work. 

The second way I am trying to help the people who would be reusing my oral histories is by making sure I leave behind as much information in addition to the recording.This is important because the structure and nature of heritage organisations means there is a lot of staff rotation. Each new staff member has to relearn the history of the hall and neither them nor I will have the time to chat about all what can be found in the oral histories I have recorded. I therefore need to create a document that helps them navigate the oral histories and seek out their value, without it being a hefty transcript. I made a spreadsheet, because nearly everyone can open these on their devices. 

On one sheet we have the oral history recordings breakdown, where I have given a summary of the whole recording, but also broken the recording down into sections I believe might be relevant, because interviews can be studied in the context of a number of themes, which we miss out on if we only stick to the objective of an individual, time-bound project. In addition I gave each section a value tag. The value tags come partially from me, historiography, institutional knowledge, and stories, and also from how the National Trust assigns value to their collection items. These value tags will obviously also change over time, as we alter our perception of what is valuable. This means we are continuously capturing our perception of value within the archive and the institution. In addition, the spreadsheet also contains a sheet with a recruitment plan so anyone is able to continue recording oral histories if they wish to do so. What I wanted to achieve with this spreadsheet is to make an easily searchable document that encourages people to go and listen to the recordings, while also allowing them to easily add and edit the entries if necessary. I believe my insistence on integrating into the Seaton Delaval Hall community and leaving behind as much information as possible besides the recording should help heritage sites integrate oral history into their day-to-day instead of having the occasional “oral history project”. 

Reuse for recording 

To reiterate, my project – on the history of gendered policy making in scientific institutions – began in the course of my internship as an archivist at the Archives at NCBS, which also entailed learning the methodology of oral history interviews. After talking to our artist-in-residence at the time about women’s safety on campus, I became interested in recording oral histories on the topic. I started exploring secondary sources as background work for my project, and found myself relying on past oral history interviews, which made me realise the importance of not creating in a vacuum when it comes to studying institutional memory, eventually culminating in my discussions with Hannah around reusing oral histories.

The plan for the project was initially to record life story interviews with a list of people across various informal interest groups on campus, and across scientific institutions in Bangalore. As with any other project documenting institutional history, my first step was to explore secondary sources. I found the work of Abha Sur, who had discussed CV Raman’s treatment of the women in his lab; and Deepika Sarma, who while writing for the magazine Connect, had explored women’s experience as later entrants into IISc. Both these projects used archival records in combination with oral history interviews they were conducting. I also went to 13 Ways, an exhibition from 2017 put up by the Archives at NCBS, which had a section dealing with gender. 13 Ways was a narrative born out of a catalogue of more than 60 oral history interviews, as well as 600+ archival objects. Having referred to these secondary sources, due diligence required that I track down the primary source, and I was able to gain access to the summaries of the oral history interviews done at NCBS – though not the actual recordings. The oral history interviews had been recorded to document the history of NCBS in 2016. These interviews include both life story interviews and interviews specific to the involvement of individuals with the construction of campus. 

Oral histories have a unique usefulness in histories of gender given the absence of gender in archival records – and in the beginning I was only reusing oral history projects insofar as they bridged this gap of information. But navigating the catalogue as I was planning out my project helped me realise the methodological value of intentional reuse for the purposes of studying institutional memory.

In planning out my interviews, I could not sidestep the problem that in asking direct questions about gender, I would be providing my interviewees a lens through which to view their lives. This was especially problematic as gender is not a neutral lens, especially in the field of science. I’m under no illusions about the subjectivity of oral histories, and the value of documenting narratives regardless. From having read Sur and Sarma’s work, I had realised, however, that my project had a different objective, because I was trying to study gender in the institution over time, instead of how it played out in one specific individual’s life, or one specific moment of time. My project combined gender and institutional history, and as we have established, the study of institutional memory is a collation of individual narratives. I worried that any conclusions I would draw from my interviews would be so fixed within the specific gender discourse of the present, that I would be left with very little scope for generalisation beyond individual experience. 

Reusing oral histories from a past project helps me in three ways: 

Firstly, I was able to find discussions of gender from people who either were completely absent from the archives, or who were generally believed to be unconnected to the issue, for instance, discussions on gender with canteen and security staff. Often overlooked in the processes of decision-making, their involvement in everyday activities on campus as subjects, observers, enactors, and in some cases enforcers, contained reflections on campus culture and power hierarchies that is completely missing from archival record. This led me to include a wider demographic in my interview plans.

Secondly, reusing oral histories lets me understand the events in the past that may or may not have shaped my interviewee’s present perceptions of the issue of gender – which will enable me to ask questions about events instead of themes in my interviews.

The oral history interviews contained information about undocumented events that were well-known on campus which I would have had no idea to even ask about – such as references to a protest and awareness/information campaign against sexual harassment in the immediate neighbourhood of campus by students, a recounting of efforts from students to formally organise into a gender collective that had fallen through, and even additional context around the institution of a shuttle service for people who walked home. In several cases, past interviews recorded the perspectives of persons who are now inaccessible. This kind of background knowledge has helped me plan out interviews such that I have some control and intentionality in where I bring in the specific lens of gender. It will let me ask questions about lived experiences without always having to guide the interviewee towards my theme. In other words it lets me talk about gender without asking about gender. This has the additional benefit of making my interviews more viable for reuse by future researchers, feeding into the cycle of recording and reusing we are proposing.

Finally, reusing the past catalogue allowed me to see the same events and themes discussed from a completely different vantage point, which will let me find patterns in my data and past data in comparison. This will hopefully allow me to construct generalisable knowledge for the institution. Gender exists within the scope of institutional memory, and therefore it is a dynamic and perpetually reshaped discourse. By providing a historiography of gender discourse, reusing past oral history interviews lets me subvert the inherent temporality of interviews to methodologically meet the requirements of studying institutional memory. Simply put, by resisting the urge to create in a vacuum, and locating my project in a continuum of other such projects, I, and researchers who study the institution after me, are better equipped to study the evolution of memory in an institution rather than its instance in a specific moment.

Conclusion

To quickly summarise, oral history is an excellent way to capture institutional memory because it captures the feelings and networks which are not held in archival documents, which motivated us to do our respective projects. However, the format of the oral history project freezes institutional memory into a rather unnatural state since by its nature institutional memory is forever changing and evolving together with the people who make up the organisation, especially as we are dealing with organisations that are still operational. Using our experience of recording and reusing oral history we have been able to explore an alternative to the usual oral history project format. We proposed that when you record oral histories you take in consideration the potential for reuse and so put in labour to make the recordings more accessible for future researchers who could be exploring a variety of themes. We also suggest that when beginning the process of recording oral histories to study institutions, researchers refer back to previous oral history projects and sources to enrich their own understanding and provide deeper and more complex context for their individual themes and lines of questioning. These two approaches, for us, allow us to rethink the concept of oral histories within institutions in a way which makes the process of studying them reiterative, and so complements the dynamic nature of memory in an operating institution, such that we are able to use the methodology of oral histories to its fullest extent.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Sources:

  1. El Sawy, O. A., Gomes, G. M., & Gonzalez, M. V., 1986. Preserving Institutional Memory: The Management of History as an Organizational Resource. Academy of Management Proceedings, 1986(1), 118–122. doi:10.5465/ambpp.1986.4980227
  2. Emmerij, L., 2005, June. The History of Ideas: An Introduction to the United Nations Intellectual History Project. In Forum for Development Studies (Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 9-20). Taylor & Francis Group.
  3. Frisch, M., 2008. “Three Dimensions and More” in Handbook of Emergent Methods, p.221.
  4. Huxtable, S. et al., 2020. Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery. National Trust: Swindon
  5. Linde, C., 2009. Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. United Kingdom: OUP USA.
  6. National Trust., 2023. Seaton Delaval Hall. [Website]. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/north-east/seaton-delaval-hall 
  7. Portelli, A., 2009. What Makes Oral History Different. In: Giudice, L.D. (eds) Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101395_2
  8. Sarma, D. 2021, June 21.Women and the Institute. Connect. https://connect.iisc.ac.in/2018/06/women-and-the-institute/
  9. Srinivasan, V., 2017. 13 Ways [Exhibition]. Archives at NCBS, Bengaluru, India. http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/exhibit/13ways/
  10. Summaries of oral history interviews, Oral history collection at Archives at NCBS. http://catalogue.archives.ncbs.res.in/repositories/2/resources/14
  11. Sur, A., 2001. Dispersed Radiance Women Scientists in C. V. Raman’s Laboratory. Meridians, 1(2), 95–127. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40338457
  12. Weiss, T.G. and Carayannis, T., 2005, June. Ideas matter: voices from the United Nations. In Forum for Development Studies (Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 243-274). Taylor & Francis Group.

OHD_PRS_0203 Capturing voices: Designing a system for better oral history reuse

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For paper that is title “designing a system for better oral history reuse” I am not going to spend a lot of time talking specifically about oral history or design. The reason for this is because designing a system for better oral history reuse involves a whole bunch of topics, which for the sake of this talk I decided to map for you to give you a better picture of my work. This is a pretty rough map, there are many things I can talk about and I realise that there are also many overlapping and interconnected themes and all of this will probably change in a week. I am not going to spend my precious ten minutes talking you through this whole map. Instead I am going to expand the themes that I am currently interested in at this point of my journey.

In 1969 Mierle Laderman Ukeles published her Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, in which she describes how the world consists of two systems: Development and Maintenance. Development involves the creation of stuff, while Maintenance is about keeping the created stuff in good condition. This theory also applies to Oral History, the Development is recording the oral history and Maintenance is the archiving and reusing of those recordings. Now my research does have a Maintenance focus but in order to do Maintenance you still need to have Development and currently I am doing some development. I am recording oral history interviews with people and I have recently come across a very interesting problem that I am going to talk about first and then I will move on to Maintenance part which is also offers plenty food for thought. 

“When I was being trained in museums, conflict over cultural heritage was a constant source of surprise – like the first hot day each summer, when, year after year, one is somehow shocked by what are, in fact, seasonable temperatures.”

I find this a very amusing comparison by Liz Sevcenko, who was Founding Director of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, which is a network of historic sites that foster public dialogue on pressing contemporary issues. The institutes within this coalition are often sites of very intense trauma with many of the sites handling issues like genocide, war, and other atrocities. 

This is Seaton Delaval Hall. Built in the 1720s the hall and its residents, the ‘Gay Delavals’ became renowned for wild parties and other shenanigans. In 1822 the hall went up in flames severely damaging the property. In 2009 after the death of Lord and Lady Hastings the property was taken over by the National Trust. A face value Seaton Delaval Hall is not necessarily like the institutes that make up the Sites of Conscience. It is a National Trust property near the sea, it has a nice rose garden, and a cafe that does excellent scones. But it is also a grand hall built in 1720s in Britain, which can only really mean one thing the Delavals, who were the family that lived in the hall, got some of their income from the British Empire. This is from a report done by the National Trust addressing various properties history with slavery and the British Empire. Sevcenko is right, summers are warmer than winters and there is conflict in all cultural heritage sites no matter how twee they look. 

In a paper about the Sites of Conscience Sevcenko points out “Heritage can never be outside politics – it is always embedded in changing power relations between people”. Seaton Delaval Hall and many other National Trust properties are no exception, however these changing power relations go far beyond the British Empire. 

A couple of weeks ago I meet the child of the old estate manager who, their whole life, lived and worked in the hall until they had to move out of the East Wing due restoration work, I will refer to them as Robin. Robin remembers when a different family the Hastings lives at the hall. Lord and Lady Hastings lived at the hall until their deaths in 2007, nearly also long as the original Delaval family. During their time there, the Hastings opened the hall to the public and regularly threw medieval banquets to raise money for the restoration of the hall. Robin also remembers the German Prisoners of War who were held at the hall during the Second World War. Their whole life Robin has been witness to the changes at the hall seeing it gradually evolve over time. 

But Robin’s history does not really fit with the narrative the National Trust has for the hall. For those who are unfamiliar with the National Trust a lot of the properties are very busy with the idea of “spirit of place.” Seaton Delaval Hall’s spirit of place is deeply connected to the original Delaval family, who were known to be pranksters and excellent party people, think 18th century Gatsby, only with the aforementioned connections to the British Empire. A lot of the hall’s promotional material is built around this and it has functioned as a source of inspiration for various installations. The history that Robin remembers is seemingly under represented at the hall, because it does not really fit with this spirit of place. 

To a certain extent I am trying to solve this particular problem by recording oral histories however in the case of Robin I have come across a problem. Due to their relationship with the National Trust Robin refuses to speak about their history with the National Trust. They will only give me stories from before the National Trust took over. This is because they know that if archived their recording will be donated to the National Trust archive. This means I cannot record the oral history I would like to because of current power structures. 

To recap the political situation of the hall: firstly we have the hall’s connections with the British Empire, which nationally is slowly being addressed with things like the report and yet the hall’s spirit of place I feel is currently not fully considering these connections. And then we have a more recent power dynamic with Robin and the more recent history which clashes with the spirit of place. In case you were wondering Robin is not alone there are some local people who are also not happy with the National Trust. 

Liz Sevcenko concludes in her paper on the Sites of Conscience that: 

Sites of Conscience do not try to suppress controversy in order to reach a final consensus. Instead of being regarded as a temporary problem to be overcome, contestation might be embraced as an ongoing opportunity to be fostered.

The National Trust might decide to stop suppressing the narrative of slavery and move away from the glorification of those who benefited from the crimes of the British Empire, but this does not solve new power dynamics that are appearing, the one blocking Robin from telling their story. In order for Seaton Delaval Hall to become a Site of Conscience, they need to be open to criticism now. They need to open up a dialogue and allow the historical narrative to change and morph over time.

So the Development side of my work is very complicated but it is essential that I do not get to bog down in the Development because that is the reason why I am doing this CDA in the first place. Currently within oral history there is a preference to record over reuse. As the oral historian Michael Frisch describes oral history archives are like “a shoebox of unwatched home videos.” This valuing Development over Maintenance is exactly what Mierle Laderman Ukeles addresses in her manifesto and her art. The big reason for the inequality according to Ukeles is because Maintenance involves tasks that are either seen as domestic and ‘feminine’ or labour done by the working class. 

However, this under valuing of maintenance can have really annoying consequences for example, I always get frustrated when I clean my fridge. There are so many little ridges that stuff gets into it is infuriating. As a designer I know that this problem could easily have been avoided if someone has just asked a cleaner some questions about how they clean a fridge. But they didn’t because people do not value maintenance. But in reality cleaners are extremely powerful, if cleaners go on strike you have a big problem.

Archivists are also part of the Maintenance system. In an article title ‘When The Crisis Fades, What Gets Left Behind?’, a direct quotation from Ukeles’ manifesto, Charlie Morgan, who is the oral history archivist at the British Library, describes how there was a rush to record the varied COVID-19 experience, but little thought was put into how the recorded material will be stored, let alone archived. 

This article reminded me of a meme my friend sent me a couple of months ago, because Morgan did not treat ‘the archive’ as a concept but as a physical institution with staff, coffee machines, and opening times. Shortly after reading this article I had a meeting with the lead archivist at Tyne and Wear Archives Newcastle. They echoed both Morgan and Ukeles when they explained that the reality of being an archivist means you spend the majority of your time on management tasks rather than on the act of archiving. I need to bring these ideas of maintenance and the everyday archive into my development and design of this oral history reuse system. I cannot be like the fridge designers and forget about the person who cleans the fridge, because cleaners are powerful and archivist are the maintenance staff of our history. If archivists stop doing the maintenance then we are in deep trouble. 

Rounding it off. One of the founding ideas behind oral history is that it gives a voice to the voiceless, however this has now become an outdated view as you can see from the things I have outlined here. Firstly, I currently am experiencing a situation where I am unable to give a voice to the voiceless because of the power structures that are present in at hall between people like Robin and the National Trust. And secondly if oral history does give a voice to the voiceless but then does not consider how to keep that voice alive by neglecting ideas around sustainable archiving and maintenance, then that voice is again lost. The aim of my project is to incorporate these ideas into my design for this oral history reuse system that will be housed at Seaton Delaval Hall. 

I hope you enjoyed my little talk on what I am currently obsessed with within my web of topics. If you ask me in a couple of weeks time what I am thinking of it will probably be something completely different. 

OHD_PRS_0127 Only Time Will Tell: the ethical dilemma of oral histories

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This one has been my favourite paper to present so far. I think it was really fun and people seemed to enjoy it.

Brainstorming

Slides

Script

[slide 1]

I am going play two sound recordings which both discuss abortion, so if you think this might upset you I invite you to mute your computer and after I have played them I will signal in the chat that you can unmute. 

(Plays segment from Redstockings Abortion Speakout, March 21, 1969, New York City and the anti-abortion film “Silent scream”) 

[slide 2]

The first clip we listened to was from the Redstockings Abortion Speakout, which took place on the 21st March 1969 in New York City. The second clip was from the anti-abortion film “Silent scream” made in 1984. 

[slide 3]

Both are featured an episode of the podcast “the Last Archive” made by historian Jill Lepore. In this podcast Lepore is trying to work out who killed truth and in this specific episode she discusses how the concept of “speaking your truth” that was used at the Redstockings’s Speakout contributed to creating the post-truth era we live in now. The whole podcast, but especially this episode haunted me whenever I started writing this paper. I would try to add it in but it did not really work, so in the end I extracted this haunting from my brain by writing

[slide 4]

 “speak your truth” on a post-it and popping it in the corner of my blackboard. I am going to do a similar thing now and 

[slide 5]

just leave a digital post-it in the corner of my presentation. 

[slide 6]

I realised that the title of my presentation is a rather ambitious, so I would like to make some amendments to in order to better frame what I am going to talk about.

[slide 7]

(Only Time Will Tell: the ethical dilemma of reusing oral histories in low risk contexts that DO NOT involve children or venerable adults, animals, topics of war, crime, drugs or sex etc.)

I am specifically looking at how to encourage reusing oral histories and the case study I am basing my research on is the National Trust property Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland, which I assume will produce relatively low-risk oral histories.

[slide 8]

In this presentation I am going to map out the basic relationship between ethics and oral history that I imagine I will experience during these next three years. 

[slide 9]

Here we see a timeline of the life of an oral history. 

[slide 10]

At the start we have our oral historian, who wishes to conduct an oral history project. 

[slide 11]

This is the beginning of the oral history’s life. Already from the start this oral history is affected by something I am going to call 

[slide 12]

“experiential noise”. I am using this term to refer to how a person perceives the world at that moment in time, which is influenced by everything from what is in the news to whether they were hugged enough as a child. I specially use the word noise because I find it to be a very nebulous and volatile feeling. Here is a quick example of experiential noise in action. 

[slide 13]

This is a picture of someone hugging their grandparent: before the pandemic this would have be a lovely picture of intergenerational love, however now you hope that the grandparent has had both their jabs. 

[slide 14]

The oral historian’s experiential noise affects the oral history straight away. Lynn Abrams, refers to this as her “research frame” and discusses in the Transformation of Oral History how her position as a “university lecturer in women’s and gender history” influenced her interviewees testimonies when she did a project on women’s life experiences during the 1950s and 1960s. 

[slide 15]

The next step in the life of the oral history is to get ethical approval. How to gain this differs between institutions. I have completed my first ethical approval for my low-risk project and it was relatively painless. I consider myself lucky. 

[slide 16]

Clutching its ethical approval the oral history moves on to meet the interviewee, who has plenty of experiential noise. 

[slide 17]

The interviewee’s experiential noise is very complicated because they are the ones who are remembering. Memory is messy and potentially all sorts of confabulation, misremembering and gaps can appear during the process. 

Now we have all this noise that is being supplied by the interviewer and interviewee, but as soon as the record button is pressed all of it is frozen. 

[slide 18]

Stopped. Now we move onto a really important step for my project. The recording can now be archived, which means that it can then be reused and reusing is the thing I am focusing on. 

[slide 19]

But we must not forget to consult the consent form, that is the appropriate permissions and clearances, which if I am being honest have no idea of:

  1. I haven’t done it yet
  2. It’s different for everyone
  3. GDPR is confusing

[slide 20]

But let us say for the sake of the story that it has been stored and is available. 

[slide 21]

Our little oral history can happily nestle between all the others holding its consent form and ethical approval close to its heart. 

[slide 22]

Some time has passed and along comes a researcher/listener. Being a pestilent human means they are full of new fresh experiential noise. Once they and the experiential noise come in contact with the oral history three things can happen:

[slide 23]

Option one:

[slide 24]

The listener listens to the oral history, goes on to write an account of why things changed or stayed the same with a full understanding of the context in which the oral history was created and the experiential noise that was present. 

[slide 25]

Option two: 

[slide 26]

Because of their experiential noise the listener listens back to the oral history and is shocked by what they hear and goes on to write something about the interviewee that is not flattering. Joanna Bornat recalls a situation where the testimonies of white Australian housewives, who initially had been interviewed about domesticity, were used to illustrate racism in 20th Century. Having their oral histories used in this way was not something the interviewees had agreed to when they gave permission for their oral history to be archived. It also suggests, as did the housewives, that racism has a history. They believed and said things then that they would not believe and say now.

[slide 27]

Option three:

[slide 28]

Again because of their experiential noise the listener listens back to the oral history and is shocked by what they hear because they are surprised that this is allowed to be public. Our relationship with privacy has changed a lot over the last few decades, as has the relationship between researcher and researched. An example of this could be when the historians Peter Jackson, Graham Smith and Sarah Olive, reused the testimonies found in the archive, the Edwardians. Theyfound that the interviewers had included field notes on the interviewees that contained information that definitely would not pass an ethics review or board these days. 

[slide 29]

In both option two and three the ethical approval and the consent to use form no longer matched up with the oral history, because the reception of the oral history had changed. The words said have not changed but their meaning has. The passage of time has not just changed the experiential noise of the listener/researcher but the whole of society’s. This is not surprising as language changes all the time, just think of the word 

[slide 30]

literally or zoom. 

This is why oral histories are so difficult to archive and write ethics for. 

[slide 31] 

The best way I can describe it is like one of those toys where you have to put right shape through the right hole. 

[slide 32]

Only in the case of oral histories the shape keeps changing.

So what do we do now?

Well I offer three options:

[slide 33]

Option one:

[slide 34]

Stop recording oral histories, stop archiving them, stop asking money for them. It’s just going to be an ethical mess. Stop it. 

Now I am going to go on a whim here and assume this probably is not what people are looking for. 

[slide 35]

Option two:

[slide 36]

We can try and improve our ethics forms to accommodate its noisy nature. Maybe if we make a system that forces us to annually update our ethics and consent forms we can keep up with the noise. Now considering how much time and effort already goes into ethics I imagine that this option is also not realistic. It reminds me of Wendy Rickard writing in her paper Oral history – ‘more dangerous than therapy’ that she wishes that more interviewees and interviewers could listen back to their tapes, but that this is simple not possible due to lack of resources – “it seems you have to be rich to be ethical”. 

[slide 37]

Option three:

[slide 38]

To start with we do more reusing. According to Michael Frisch within oral history there is a preference to record interviews instead of reuse them. This results in less information on the process of reusing. Which is why I am suggesting that we reuse more so we can learn more about it. The more we revisit, the more we can reflect, the faster we can pick up on ethical misdemeanours or challenges and the more we can improve the process of recording, archiving and reusing oral histories. We need to become more practiced in reusing and learn more about the ethical pitfalls of reuse. It is important to keep telling these histories that people have worked hard for to capture, but this also means we need to keep the shop tidy. Sometimes we might make a mistake but then it is our responsibility as a community to fix it and grow. 

[slide 39]

We are never going to be able to write the perfect ethics form. Time affects how we experience oral history so we need to find something that is as stubborn and relentless as time which I believe is 

[slide 40]

us (the human race)—the vessels of experiential noise and the deciders of 

[slide 41] 

“what is ethical?”. 

[slide 42]

Like our history, our ethics change with us because it lives within us, so trying to shove all the nebulous responsibility onto a single static document does not make sense. So for now we might just have to hustle though because only time will tell if we are doing it right. 

[slide 43]

But there is one more thing… 

[slide 44]

The post-it note. “Speak your truth”. 

So after I had finished planing this paper, I stared at the post-it note for while contemplating its existence. Eventually I concluded that the option three, where we embrace reusing and all its messiness was really scary. In this post-truth world where everyone “speaks their truth” and does not listen to each other it is terrifying to simple get on with and keep going. As an oral historian you could ruin someone’s life because you allowed public access to their testimony and someone completely misused it. You could write something and be “cancelled” or “trolled” for your opinions. Or you can have your funding cut by your government because the narrative your telling is not what they want to hear. 

[slide 45]

Initially I was going to end it here in a slightly depressing way, but I sent my draft to my supervisor who said that I might be over-worrying a little bit. His words reminded me of something my old neighbour used to say, something that I think is important when you do pretty much anything in live including research: 

[slide 46]

“all perfect must go to Allah so if you want to keep your rug you have to make a little mistake”

OHD_PRS_0126 Oral History’s Design

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This presentation was only 3 minutes. There were some lovely archive nerds in the audience.

Slides

Script

[slide one]

What do this lamp, this corkscrew and the iPod have in common? 

Other than the fact that they are all very colourful,  they also all radically changed the meaning of their use in comparison to their predecessors.

[slide two]

Lamps are there to illuminate a room and look pretty. 

But Yang LED was made to adapt to the mood of resident and is not even meant to be seen.

[slide three]

Corkscrews are there to open my wine

But this corkscrew by Alessi “dances” for you.

[slide four]

Portable music players allowed you to listen to music on the move. 

But the iPod allowed you to cheaply buy songs from iTunes and then curate them into your own personal soundtrack. 

[slide five]

All three of these examples and their respective change in meanings are the result of design-driven innovation a term used by the design scholar Roberto Verganti in a book by the same name. 

Design-driven innovation works like this… 

[slide six]

Here on this graph we have two axis: change in technology and a change in meaning both have a scale from incremental to radical change. In the corner we have market pull/user-centered design. 

[slide seven]

Here we have the bubble design-driven innovation, where see radical change in meaning and the bubble technological push where there is radical change in technology. 

In this yellow part where there is a radical change in meaning but not in technology we find designs like alessi’s corkscrew. 

In this blue section we find technologies like the first mp3 player, which was a significant technological upgrade from portable cassette and cd players. 

Now in this green part we find the iPod. 

[slide eight]

This is green part is what Verganti refers to as a technological epiphany. 

[slide nine]

My PhD is in collaboration with the National Trust property Seaton Delaval Hall. This property wishes to create an oral history archive and the reason that I started this presentation by talking about the now obsolete iPod is because just like Apple did in 2001 I would also like to achieve a 

[slide ten]

technological epiphany. 

[slide eleven]

Presently archives are very busy digitising their collections which is great especially during the pandemic. 

[slide twelve]

However this push to digitise fall very much in the blue technological push category. Everyone else is online so archives better move there too. The result of this however is websites that look like this. 

[slide thirteen]

Not particularly sexy or even that helpful. 

[slide fourteen]

What I want to do with my project is actually stop and think about how this technology could actually change the meaning of archiving. 

[slide fifteen]

Venganti describes the many ways one can achieve this but it all boils down to doing a lot of talking across disciplines. 

[slide sixteen]

How would a graphic designer redesign this page? How does the PhD student feel when they are in an archive? How would an environmentalist make a sustainable archive? How do game designers handle information? Many questions, a lot of information and hopefully a change in what it means to archive. 

OHD_PRS_0125 Oral History’s Design: Sustaining visitor (re)use of oral histories on heritage sites

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On 26 March I presented my first paper during a series of Digital Heritage Workshops organised by Lancaster University and IIT Indore. It was really scary and weird. I didn’t feel looked after at all. I also presented something that had already been discussed by previous speakers. Anyway you live and learn.

Script

This is Seaton Delaval Hall. Built in the 1720s the hall and its residents, the ‘Gay Delavals’ became renowned for wild parties and other shenanigans. In 1822 the hall went up in flames severely damaging the property. This history is represented very well in the collection that is housed at the hall which is now run by the National Trust. 

What is less represented is the more recent history. The community that looked after the hall after it burnt it down, when it was a prisoner of war camp during both wars and later when the late Lord Hastings invited the local people to parties after its restoration. 

This history lives within the local community. Luckily we have the wonderful field of oral history that allows us to capture this predominately undocumented history.

However oral history has a deep dark secret. After recordings have been made and analysed, they are locked into an archive or into a historians cupboard and never heard from again. They are like a box of unwatched home videos. 

This in the context of Seaton Delaval hall seems sad as its strength as an institution lies within its deep connection with its surrounding area. It would therefore be a shame if the community who gave these histories cannot access them. I also personally think this to be ethical dubious as the lack of access to these oral histories brings up issues of power inequality where an institution like the National Trust happily takes the oral histories but not giving something in return. 

SO this is the challenge: we want to make oral histories reusable for the visitors of the hall. 

To make the rather complex problem more tangible I have focused in on the idea of sustainability:

I would like to point out here that I am using the term storage system instead of archive because I feel that the idea of the archive is very loaded and cultural represented as not particularly accessible to the masses. 

Let’s start with the visitors and volunteers. This particular group, especially the volunteers, are the people who will contribute and donate their oral histories to the hall. Now because of the standard time and financial constraints the period of recording will not be able to capture all the stories. So this system that will house the the initial recordings needs to be dynamic and sustainable enough for the visitors and volunteers to keep adding and reflecting on the history.

For the staff the term sustainability addresses user friendliness. It needs to be easy for a new staff to learn how the system is use and managed. 

This is where I believe the digital can help. 

The digital as we are all fully aware has the amazing capacity to allow people from across world to upload, download, browse all sorts of content. It’s awesome. Also as time goes on more and more people are getting familiar with the digital sphere. Especially with the pandemic which forced to many use it more. This is not just individuals but also the case for most institutions notably those in the culture sector who have been very busy trying stay afloat by working out how they can use all these digital tools to keep their audience. The digital and its tools have become and are increasingly becoming part of everyday life. 

The dynamic and sustainable requirement of the system, where people can easily add information and stories is pretty covered by basic digital systems. 

The user friendliness can be achieved if the staff are involved right at the beginning with the design of the system. Allowing it to mould to the staff’s digital habits and knowledge.

What the digital can also help the staff with is storage. The digital is able to store documents in also sorts of formats and in all sorts of locations. I personally find that the internets ability to duplicate (think memes) might be a possible tool that could help storage issues but that simultaneously brings up all sorts ethical issues around permissions and copyright. 

However what the digital also has done is created this desperate need to record and store everything and therefore also a huge sense of loss when something isn’t captured. Because as you are able to capture and store something you also create a whole bunch of things that arent captured and therefore lost. Technology has always played a huge role in this, just look at the field of oral history which relies completely on the ability to record someone’s voice. So then the question is should we record everything? Do we need to record everything? It’s tempting when you can record everything. But then you have everything and that is also useless because you cannot reuse everything. One of the archivists at the Parliamentary Archives once told me that they had calculated how long it would take for them and their colleague to digitise everything and it was 120 years. This paradox brings up issues around value. What do we value? Whose voices do we value? But an even bigger problem is what will we value?

This one of the bigger I imagine we will be dealing with in the next couple of years. Trying to keep the digital eco system healthy and not complete collapse under its own weight. 

The digital is still very young. Which is proven by what it can do really enthusiastically like record everything and allow everyone to contribute. But it is also proven by the gaps that has. For example many search functions on online archives are difficult to use and don’t deliver that same serendipitous feeling that brick and mortar archive has. A search bar is not close to being the same as an archivist who knows the collection. Robots are not completely ready to replace humans just yet. For now humans will have to fill in the gaps that the digital has. 

A good example of this blend of human and digital is that people who are unable to do their research because they cannot go into archives or the digitisation of the document they are interested in is not good enough. What I have seen many people do now is use their human network to access these documents by ringing people up and asking them take pictures of documents. I thought this was a funny cyborg-y moment where people needed both technology and a human person to achieve their goal. 

So what we are looking at is how the digital can support the needs of humans at Seaton Delaval Hall by adapting to their needs. But at the same the humans are free and able to fill in these gaps that are present in the digital. 

However there is one more layer I would like to add to this challenge of building a sustainable storage system. And that is the environment. Our environment heavily influences whether we can access archives. A pandemic can shut us off from the brick and mortar archives. A power cut can take down the servers where the digital archive stored. Or an earth quake or storm can destroy both completely. 

This in addition to digital gaps is why I do not believe that it is sustainable to solely relay on either a digital or a brick and mortar storage system. A system that floats between these two worlds and at its centre has the humans that are reason for its existence, that I believe is the closest we might get to having something sustainable. Something that will allow Seaton Delaval Hall and its community continue telling stories for generations to come. 

Slides

OHD_PRS_0124 Presentation/Interview

Below is the presentation I had to do in order to be chosen as the student to complete this PhD. The interview took place on Feb 18th 2020 and the question I had to answer was, “What are the key challenges and opportunities [in this PhD] and how will you address them?”

SLIDE ONE

I have set this presentation up as a Venn diagram of three main parties of this CDA: National Trust and the heritage sector, Oral history and Design. In order to answer your question, I will navigate through the various sections of the Venn diagram identifying opportunities, challenges and how will address them. 

SLIDE TWO

I think the first opportunity lies with the National Trust property Seaton Delaval Hall. If you observe the setting and history of the Hall you will find it to be the appropriate setting for this CDA. Firstly, the Hall is in the middle of a wide and rich community. Over hundreds of years the Hall and its inhabitants have contributed to this community and return the community has also given back with the most recent example being the money that was raise to help the National Trust take over the property. Secondly, it is a relatively young National Trust property. By that I mean that it has only been acquired by the National Trust in the last 11 years, meaning that until very recently; stories, memories and histories were being made at the Hall. Seaton Delaval Hall is therefore a perfect candidate for any oral history project, however a recent collaboration between the National Trust and MA in Multidisciplinary Innovation at Northumbria University makes the Hall the perfect location for this CDA.

SLIDE THREE

In May 2019 as part of the Rising Stars Project the National Trust came to Northumbria University with hope to collaborate in setting up a new oral history project. I was part of the team on the Multidisciplinary Innovation MA that was given the challenge of creating a new, an innovative method for collecting, archiving and displaying oral history. We started off by investigating methods of collecting group memories, as at first we found the National Trust’s current prescribed method of collecting oral history too formulaic. We concluded that due to the aforementioned setting of the Hall there should be a focus on reengaging the local community through this oral history programme. So we wanted to create a more participatory type of oral history that reveal a bigger picture of the Hall and created a sense of collective ownership of these histories. Instead of the “rather odd social arrangement” of the one-to-one interview, as Smith describes it in Beyond Individual / Collective Memory: Women’s Transactive Memories of Food, Family and Conflict, the team wanted to lay the power of the narrative with the participants instead of the interviewer. What we wanted to avoid is what the historian Lynn Abrams experienced while working on a project about women’s life experience in the 1950s and 60s. During that project she found that her position as an expert in women’s and gender history and implied feminist meant that her participants adapted their story to fit the wider feminist narrative. However, as our project progressed and the team dove further into oral history theory we started to understand the importance of individual interviews. Especially because during the testing of our group interviews we found that some people were less comfortable with the group setting and therefore would contribute less.

SLIDE FOUR

So, after three months of research, designing, testing, refining and testing again we developed two new group-interview methods alongside an incorporated individual interview. We also created several ways to display oral histories around the property, and potential new methods of archiving oral histories. Despite the high level of outputs the project only really scratched the surface, however it gave the opportunity for this CDA to exist in the first place. I view this project as the launchpad for this CDA. What it did was start an exploration into collective ownership and the role of community within the context of oral history at Seaton Delaval Hall and it brought together the various parties sitting here today. But most importantly it revealed that it would require more time and effort for it to be successful. This is especially the case with archiving, which was purposefully left open ended by the team, because as we producing all the previously mention outputs we discovered that oral history archiving is a very difficult problem. 

SLIDE FIVE

Micheal Frisch discusses difficult problem this extensively in his paper ‘Three Dimensions and More’. He describes oral history archives as a shoebox of unwatched family videos and outlines various paradoxes that occurs in oral history archives. One of the paradoxes, the Paradox of Orality, refers to the inappropriateness of the reliance on transcripts in the context of oral history. Many oral historians, including Alessandro Portelli, agree that using transcripts in archiving reduces and distorts what was originally communicated by the interviewee. Although there are many archives that rely on transcripts, there are also archiving systems being developed that tackle this exact issue. Certain systems are already engaging with this paradox by using various forms of technology. Such as the Shoah Visual History Foundation, set up by the film director Steven Spielberg, where video testimonies of holocaust survivors are indexed, timestamped in English and can be navigated along multiple pathways. Another example is Oral History Metadata Sychronizer (OHMS) created at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries, which can be navigated by searching any word and it will jump to the exact moment that person is talking about the searched word (Boyd). I imagine throughout the CDA these systems, including the more analogue archives need to be explored further in order to uncover the opportunities for innovation. What we are specifically looking for is the opportunity to create a system that is not driven by technological advancements, but by a desire to change the culture of how we use archives. 

SLIDE SIX

Currently, we use all types for archives in a static way, which is the opposite to how we treat history. Not only are we constantly making new history through the passage of time, our attitudes towards history constantly changes. For example the global discussion surrounding artefacts in the British Museum or even attitudes towards mining. Recently I worked with the arts and education charity Hand Of at the Durham Miners Hall with children from the local area. Working with these children you see that they view mining through a completely different lens to the generation that came before. While you and I might associate mining with the miners’ strike and the deindustrialisation of the UK, these children view mining as something from the pass, something important to the previous communities but ultimately something unsustainable and bad for the environment.

The static nature of the archives is in complete contradiction to how people experience history. I believe this CDA is looking for is a more sustainable and dynamic preservation of stories. A system that taps into the ever changing zeitgeist reflected in its visitors instead of keeping everything frozen in time. 

Well the CDA is called the ‘Oral history Design’. In my eyes I see design the provider of tools for exploration, with Seaton Delaval Hall providing the test subjects. This CDA would not be possible if it was not for the resources that the National Trust has to offer. Those resources being the visitors, the volunteers, those who provide the histories and the team working at Seaton Delaval. I believe that in order to create a system that is truly sustainable it needs to be tested at every point of the process and the collaboration with the National Trust gives us that opportunity. 

SLIDE NINE

The challenge however is finding the appropriate design tools. Design intervention and the use of design thinking tools can deliver high rewards but it can also cause considerable damage if not use responsibly. Not only do I expect to do more research into design methods on top of the ones I am already familiar with. I also expect to constantly be reviewing, adapting and modifying the tools and design process as project progresses. This is something that is highly encouraged by many people in the field of including the Kelley brothers, from IDEO, who openly invite people to adapt their methods and Natascha Jen from Pentagram, who argues that design thinking is more of a mindset, not a diagram or tool. Within this CDA this might evolved into regular reflection on the process both from myself as the student and from the other parties involved. All of this is especially important because the collaboration between design and oral history is a relatively new and unexplored territory.

SLIDE TEN

This unexplored territory, however gives the CDA opportunity to explore something in addition to the creation of a new archiving system; the methodology behind cross-disciplinary work within the academy. Cross-disciplinary work is nebulous and struggles to be categorised within the academic system. As I found throughout my MA there is a lot literature that talks about interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary work. These papers, books and articles talk about bringing various parties together in order to solve a problem but it is nearly always in the context of business or social enterprise. The CDA will therefore offer us the opportunity to research and experience multidisciplinary or cross-disciplinary work within the context of a university. 

However, cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary work, whatever you would like to name it, does come with its fair share of challenges. I am familiar with this as during my MA I had to work in an 18-strong team of people from a diverse range of ages, ethnicities, nationalities and socio-economic backgrounds and different fields of work. Throughout the year it was clear that one of our biggest barriers was communicating across these differences. It often felt like I was speaking a completely different language, which sometimes was the case, as certain ambiguous words were perceived differently depending on the person’s background. I predict this to happen throughout the CDA, not only across the design and oral history but also with the National Trust and any additional parties that might be involved. 

SLIDE ELEVEN

It is essential that we have as many of these cross-disciplinary conversations as possible. Roberto Verganti, in his book Design-driven Innovation, refers to these types of cross-disciplinary conversations as a ‘design discourse’ – experts from different backgrounds exchanging information. Verganti finds this to be essential in design-driven innovation, an innovation strategy that pursues change through a reinvention of the meaning of a product or system instead of relying of technology. Which is exactly what this CDA is looking for. 

This design discourse needs to be managed and organised efficiently, which I feel confident I am capable of doing due to working in teams throughout my professional and academic work. Especially thanks to my MA and my work with Hand Of and teaching for the early English programme Such Fun! I know the importance of clear communication and disciplined organisation. I imagine that I as the student of this CDA, I will have to take a project manager-esque role in order to float between the different disciplines, communicating progress and finally managing expectations. 

SLIDE TWELVE 

And that really is the crux of it all, managing expectations, because you cannot guarantee anything. For all we know the answer to design oral history archives is – don’t, National Trust’s prescribed archiving method of electronic cascading files does the job perfectly well. For now this CDA is exploring the unknown, but that is what I like about it. I spent three years in a Goldsmiths art studio exploring the unknown, then I did an MA do to more targeted exploration of the unknown and now I have a narrow it down again in applying for this CDA. Exploring the unknown is full of opportunities and challenges, but you have to do it in order to find them and I very much like to do it. 

The feedback a got on my presentation was good, however I did not do as well on answering the questions. This is a completely fair judgement as I felt slightly unprepared. I think it is important that I start planning out the steps I will be taking throughout the three years and deadlines for certain outputs.

OHD_PRS_0122 Staying flexible: how to build an oral history archive

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The second conference paper I presented. This one went better than the first one so that is positive.

Slides

Script

[slide two]

This is Seaton Delaval Hall. This National Trust property can be found in Northumberland just up the coast from Newcastle. Built in the 1720s the hall and its residents, the ‘Gay Delavals’ became renowned for wild parties and other shenanigans. 

[slide three]

In 1822 the hall went up in flames severely damaging the property. This history is well represented in the collection that is housed at the hall. 

[slide four]

What is less represented, however, is the hall’s more recent history: the community that looked after the hall after it burnt it down, the prisoner of war camps, and the medieval themed parties that the late Lord Hastings threw after the hall’s restoration. 

For my PhD I will attempt to solve this issue of missing history by building an oral history archive. Oral history is a tool that has been employed many times to help represent the underrepresented in history. The challenge however is to build an archive with these oral histories. To help me explain how I am approaching this challenge I will use a metaphor.

[slide five]

This is a Ferrero Rocher. Through this yummy treat I will attempt to explain my project and the various layers of the process that need to be considered and analysed in order to be able to build an affective oral history archive.

[slide six]

The Hazelnut AKA a new storage system

The metaphorical hazelnut and core of this project is this storage system that will hold the oral histories I record. Why do I call it a storage system and not archive? I say this for three reasons, firstly because archives and oral history recordings are not the best of friends. 

[slide seven]

The original framework that we use to structure and build archives is, and has always been, based around archiving mostly written documents. Searching through this type of material is easy because their content is visually apparent. These days you can, if they have been digitise, word search the documents very easily. 

[slide eight]

Oral histories recordings (not the transcripts) struggle to fit into this framework, because their content can only be accessed if you sit down and listen to them. Listening back to these recordings can take a lot of time and can be hindered by outdated technology. This mismatch between the material and the place where it is stored often discourages people to reuse oral histories.

[slide nine]

I think the oral historian Micheal Frisch puts it best when he called oral history archives “a shoebox of unwatched home videos.” The content is there but the viewing a specific moment is an arduous task. Mining the hall’s community for stories and throwing them into a shoebox is exactly what I want to avoid with this PhD. 

[slide ten]

At Seaton Delaval Hall I want to create a storage system that broadens access to and actively encourages reuse of the oral histories, in order to support the community that has looked after the hall for so many years.

The second reason I say storage system instead of archive is ….

[slide eleven]

because currently archives are struggling with adapting to advancing technology. In recent years there has been a push to digitise archives with the COVID-19 pandemic giving this process an exceptional boost. 

[slide twelve]

However, this digitisation requires a lot of resources like money, time and manpower that many archives, especially smaller ones, simply do not have. 

[slide thirteen] 

In addition, what this push to digitise does, which it does in many sectors, is attempt to replace a human with a robot, who in my opinion is simply not up to the task. Typing into a search bar is not the same as asking an archivist for help. 

[slide fourteen]

While a search bar is a tool one uses when researching, the archivist becomes a fellow researcher, making room for far more flexible and creative exploration. 

[slide fifteen]

Thirdly, archives are rather static in comparison to the world outside of their brick and mortar walls. 

[slide sixteen]

Especially in the last year there has been increasing pressure to review how we present our history as a society. This dynamic debate is not reflected in the way we store our historical documents. 

[slide seventeen]

This limited reviewing and updating of our archives actually makes it harder to do research. The most obvious instance being how certain keywords become outdated over time, which is something that is especially prominent in the archiving of minorities’s histories such as LGBTQA+ and Black history. 

[slide eighteen]

The way we traditionally build an archive does not fit with contemporary society. Archives were initial set up to preserve one view of history in one type format. They did not leave room for new technologies and new points of view. Now, archives are attempting to change this by rather awkwardly moving into the digital space without truly questioning how these digital tools affect the archiving process and researching in archives. 

In order to create a new storage system I wish to let go of these traditions, these symbols and languages that we use to navigate oral histories, archives and the digital. 

[slide nineteen]

I want to start with a blank canvas and build a storage system that not only reflects the technology and views found in society but also makes room for any further developments in these areas. Now, the next question is: how we might go about building this new system?

[slide twenty]

The chocolate filling AKA working together without killing each other

[slide twenty-one]

AKA collaborating! A truly fabulous buzzword that works very well in funding applications but in reality is really difficult to do. Why? Well, every field of research has its own type of 

[slide twenty-two]

‘disciplinary upbringing.’ 

[slide twenty-three]

When I say ‘disciplinary upbringing’ I am referring to the lens that each field views things like language and methods of work through. In other words the 

[slide twenty-four]

‘here we do things this way’ attitude. 

[slide twenty-five]

When people collaborate across disciplines they bring this lens, this disciplinary upbringing, with them so when the work starts everyone is viewing the challenge through separate and different lenses. This can lead to a lot clashes and plenty confusion.

So how do you solve this? 

[slide twenty-six]

You could just say that people should leave their disciplinary upbringing at the door but that never works. 

[slide twenty-seven]

Instead I intend on using these disciplinary upbringings to the advantage of the creative process by encouraging people to be open about them and in some cases even exaggerate them a bit. What this does is bring to light the various

[slide twenty-eight]

‘creative tensions’ that are present in the collaboration. 

[slide twenty-nine]

For example in the context of this project where we have a collaboration between the fields of oral history, design and heritage you can find many creative tensions that are the consequence of differing disciplinary upbringings. 

[slide thirty]

Between oral history and design there is the tension of the medium of communication; historians like writing and designers love a good visual. 

[slide thirty-one]

I can tell you from experience that design and heritage work at dramatically different speeds. One of design’s key philosophies is “fail fast”, which is definitely not something would be mentioned in a National Trust meeting. 

[slide thirty-two]

Finally, between oral history and heritage we find possibly the most challenging of creative tensions, which is differing opinions on the representation of history. 

[slide thirty-three]

It is important to identify these creative tensions because they highlight issues that might have otherwise gone unseen if everyone had just been polite and kept their mouth shut. 

[slide thirty-four]

Once they have been determined they function as a great source of information. This information needs to be drawn out through thorough questioning. It is essential to discover why the tension exists and how it might inform the creative process. 

[slide thirty-five]

This does however mean that sometimes you might have to ask what seem like silly and obvious questions, because your disciplinary upbringing to begin with blocks you from fully understanding where other people are coming from. To complete the questioning to its fullest potential it is necessary to unpack any confusion no matter how small or trivial they might seem. 

[slide thirty-six]

However the most fundamental thing within this chocolate filling of collaboration is — listening. One must always remember that you are not there to defend your disciplinary upbringing, you are there to solve a collective problem. When identifying and questioning creative tensions everyone must listen to all of those collaborating. 

[slide thirty-seven]

Overall the chocolate filling represents something that can be very difficult, but with open minds, questioning and listening can be exceptionally fruitful.

[slide thirty-eight]

The Crunchy shell aka beyond the toolkit 

A Ferrero Rocher is not complete without its crunchy shell and neither would this project. The crunchy shell in this context represents the legacy of the project. It is important to me that the project and the storage system does not end with the completion of this PhD. 

[slide thirty-nine]

In order to avoid this I and everyone involved in the project shall thoroughly question and analyse the process of building this storage system. We need to reflect on what worked and what didn’t work. This questioning needs to be beyond which workshop activity was fun and whether we had enough time. 

[slide forty]

What we need to do is extract questions that will help someone else set up a similar project. So instead of creating a rigid set of instructions with painfully particular processes, we offer future oral history projects questions that they must ask themselves before, during, and after the project. This hopefully will allow them to adapt the process to their needs and encourages them to think more creatively. 

[slide thirty-nine]

Conclusion

Now I completely recognise the irony of me slamming the idea of a rigid sets of instructions and then ending on a how-to guide, but in my defence I had the title before I fully wrote the paper so please forgive me. 

How to build an oral history archive 

  • Let go of your preconceptions of what an archive is (and also what the digital is)
  • Work together by allowing creative tensions to occur and be questioned 
  • Reflect on your process and extract questions for future projects

The true aim of this how-to is to make sure that we do not end up in the same position we are now, where our archives no longer reflect society. The world is only going to get more complicated so if we do not leave room for questioning and change, archives are always going to be behind. This would be a disaster as archives on a macro scale are the keepers of our history and (in theory) hold the foundations of our collective identities as a people. On a more micro scale I have personally always found comfort in how archives keep documents that show everyday humanity, like a postcard to a fellow artist or a writer’s note to a partner. 

So here is my how-to on making an oral history archive. Take it with you, try it out, tell me if it worked. I am going to do the same and probably change it many times in the next three years. 

OHD_PRS_0120 The Unseen: Maintenance Labour on Heritage Sites

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// “To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the the shipwreck. To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment. To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway.” (Virilio, P. (2007) The Original Accident. Cambridge: Polity, p. 10) 

// To have an interactive game in your museum is invent the “out of order” sign and 

// to open a heritage site is to invent the tape which communicates “sorry this part of the house is closed due to restoration”. 

// Any creation brings with it everything that could possibly go wrong and also all the things that need to be done ensure things do not go wrong. 

// This includes a curated visitor experience on a heritage site. Many things can go wrong, so there are a lot of things to do to ensure things run smoothly: are there enough volunteers to show visitors around, are the toilets clean, is the cafe well stocked, is the art collection available to view, are the gutters clean so they do not flood in case it rains. And for National Trust sites there is added pressure because the visitor experience also needs adhere with the expectations people have of National Trust sites. 

// The theme of this conference is ‘experience’ and I would like to talk about 

// the labour necessary to allow an experience to be experienced on a heritage site 

// specifically the maintenance labour, and how 

// maintenance labour’s position in society radically influences the running of heritage sites and

//  how this effects the work I am doing with my PhD which is in collaboration with the National Trust property Seaton Delaval Hall. 

// I think we need to start by understanding what maintenance labour is  

// I am going to do by introducing you to three characters with three stories that will help me illustrate the nature of maintenance work and the position it holds in society: Jo, who is part of my supervisory team, the collector and entrepreneur Robert Beerbohm, and the artist Meirle Laderman Ukeles. 

// Jo works for the National Trust as a curator among other things, titles are a bit vague in the Trust so I am not completely clear on what they do, this is also not a picture of them, obviously. They told me a story of when they were walking around a Trust property together with their predecessor. Their predecessor decided to point out some of their biggest achievements, which was not a new cafe or an exhibition but 

// a window frame that look exactly like it did when they started. This is a perfect embodiment of maintenance work, because if the predecessor had not pointed the window frame out to Jo, they admitted that they probably would not have noticed it at all. In this window there is no evidence of the predecessor work, their work is completely invisible which is common for maintenance work. 

// We just expect our streets to not be full of rubbish, the toilets in our buildings to be clean, fresh water to come out of our taps. We often do not see, or wish not to see the effort behind these things. 

// So they live an invisible life until things go wrong, 

// which brings me Robert Beerbohm. 

In the book How Buildings Learn Stewart Brand tells the story of the collector Robert Beerbohm, who had over million dollars’ worth of comic books and baseball cards stored in 

// a warehouse in California. The roof had a known drainage problem but the building owners had not prioritised this to be fixed. One day there was particular heavy rain fall and the roof leaked terribly flooding the entire warehouse, damaging all the collectables. Beerbohm lost everything. 

// If we compare the warehouse to the window in the Trust property, we see how maintenance only becomes visible once it has failed or not been done at all. The window was maintained but there are no traces of the work put in, while the warehouse was not maintained and the results are obvious and catastrophic. Maintenance only becomes visible in a negative way. 

// As Brand says maintenance work is “all about the negative, never about rewards.” If the roof had been fixed and the roof did not collapse Beerbohm would not have technically gain anything but he also would not have lost anything either. He would however not be aware of the lack of loss because nothing happened. All maintenance offers is stability, no tangible reward, in fact Beerbohm would have lost money on fixing the roof and that is exactly how it would have felt, as a loss. Maintenance always feels like a loss and a waste because it takes time, work and money to do it and in the end you have nothing new to show for it. You just go back to where you started. You keep the window frame exactly the way it is. And then once it is done you have to start all over again. 

// And yet as Brand concludes “the issue is core and absolute: no maintenance, no building.” 

// The artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 

// wrote a manifesto titled 

// Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! And in it Ukeles presents this idea of society dividing up labour into two systems: 

// the development system and the maintenance system. The words Ukeles uses to describe the maintenance system 

// “Keep the dust off, preserve, sustain, protect, defend, prolong, renew” all fit within the tales of Jo and Beerbohm, maintenance is about protecting, prolonging and generally keeping the dust off things.  But it is how Ukeles describes the development system that really puts things into perspective:

//  “pure individual creation; the new; change; progress; advance; excitement”. These are some really fun buzzwords. You are going to want to get some of these into your funding application. 

// And that is exactly what Ukeles is trying to tell us with her manifesto, in society we value development over maintenance. When child comes home from school they want to talk about their fabulous new sculpture made from a milk carton sellotaped to piece of cardboard with stuck on googly eyes.They are not going to tell you about how they tidied up the classroom after they had finished crafting their masterpiece to make it look exactly like it was before they got out the scissors and glue. We do not care about maintenance. Maintenance is less fun, as 

// Ukeles says “Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the f***ing time”. And because we do not care for maintenance work means that we do not reward people for maintenance work. 

// In her art Ukeles discusses the unpaid domestic labour she has to do as a mother but also the labour carried out by the sewage department for example, which is also not going to make you the big bucks.

// To quickly summarise, 

// maintenance is often completely invisible because the outcome makes things seem to ‘stay the same’, 

// it is deeply undervalued in society due our obsession with development, 

// and yet it is utterly essential. This is the case everywhere and 

//heritage sites are no exception. 

If you work on a heritage site two of the hottest topics of conversation is not what the soup of the day is but 

// volunteers and funding and both are severely affected by our societies rather negative view of maintenance work. 

To start with let’s look at volunteers. 

// Just like we rely on maintenance workers to remove the rubbish from our streets, fix our pipes, and clean our nappies, we all rely on 

// National Trust sites to look like National Trust sites, if they don’t we get angry. Let’s take a more specific example – 

// a National Trust garden. A National Trust garden has a look, it is essential that it gets achieved every year for visitor satisfaction, which means it often is achieved every year. 

// So we are kind of going back to the window. Every year the garden looks the same, just like the window, and this stability erases the traces of labour giving the illusion of a magical garden that always looks this great. But this does not just happen.

// It requires a lot of work and who does this work? 

// A couple of head gardeners (a classic maintenance job) 

// and mostly, because it is the National Trust, volunteers, literally people who do not get paid to do the work. 

// Now volunteering is a fantastic opportunity for people to build a community and keep themselves generally occupied, I cannot deny that. But you can also not deny that a volunteer doing gardening is putting a professional gardener out of a job. 

// In the paper Making usable pasts: Collaboration, labour and activism in the archive, an archivist, Carole McCallum, from Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) is quoted saying that she did not want bring volunteers into the archive because it would put a professional out of a job. 

// In another paper on ‘punk archaeology’ the author writes “If people are willing to undertake some forms of archaeological work for free, it is possible this will impact on the value of paid work in the sector.” 

// The use of volunteers on heritage sites creates a vicious cycle, it starts with 

// maintenance labour being undervalued, 

// maintenance jobs then are the first to become unpaid volunteering opportunities, and 

// because the work is now done for free the value of the maintenance work drops again because who would paid someone to do a job when another does it for free. 

// Moving on to funding. It is common knowledge that heritage sites like the majority of organisations in the culture sector rely on money from big funding bodies. 

// Funding bodies therefore have a lot of decision power over what gets money and what does not. If you go to the National Lottery Heritage Fund website and go to the “Projects we’ve funded page” and type ‘develop’ into the search bar you get two pages of results. Now this is not a lot but that is because it just searches titles. 

// Nevertheless if you type in maintenance you get one hit. This is no the most solid evidence and I am looking to do audit of the types of projects that have been funded by large funding bodies. But for now it will have to do, it hints at a difference in value. However, there is one other thing, in this single maintenance hit the title includes the term restoration. It is important to point out that restoration and maintenance are not the same thing. 

// In How Buildings Learn Stuart Brand quotes John Ruskin, “Take proper care of your monuments, and you will not need to restore them. Watch an old building with an anxious care, guard as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation.” Restoration is only necessary when maintenance fails. 

// Now if you type restoration into the search bar you get many pages of projects. The National Lottery Heritage Fund gives a lot of money to restoration projects. You see restoration and development deliver the same amount of satisfaction, the before and after is impactful and makes everyone go ‘ooh’ and the funding bodies can go home feeling that they made a difference. But if we follow Ruskin then they would not need to do this if they funded maintenance. But as we know it is not sexy and above all it is endless. You cannot fit maintenance into a time limited project and the way the funding systems works we have to work in terms of projects and tangible achievements, so funding maintenance is not an option. 

// So to summarise our undervaluing of maintenance in society has led to 

// an increase in volunteers replacing paid jobs and 

// funding bodies to focus on development and restoration above maintenance projects. And this is where we get to the real painful part, because this is not going to change. We live in an extreme capitalist society which has not changed much since 

// Ukeles pointed out how we do not about care about maintenance work more than fifty years. Look at how we treat our key workers. We clapped for them for a bit 

// but now the vacancies in care and hospitals speak for themselves and you cannot avoid signs asking you not to abuse the staff in most place’s where key workers operate. 

// So society is not going to change but I still have to finish my PhD by 2025 so I will have to work within this framework. 

// My project is specifically looking at how to sustain (re)use of oral history recordings on heritage sites and I am working in collaboration with Seaton Delaval Hall. So basically I am designing a type of archive because currently archives are not oral history recordings’ best friend. 

// What I am doing is 100% part of 

// the development system, and my collaboration partners, the staff at Seaton Delaval Hall are the 

// maintenance workers who have to keep the dust off my creation. Now of course they could simply 

// throw my work into the bin after January 2025 but for my own sense of pride I would like to avoid that. I believe this means I must understand and incorporate ideas of maintenance into my work. 

// First thing I need to do is make something 

// realistic. Now that sounds obvious but currently people are very obsessed with getting technological solutions to problems, 

// which is great but not very realistic. 

// Not a lot of people have the capacity to maintain super complicated digital softwares and considering the National Trust’s reliance on volunteers, who unlikely to have significant computer coding skills, they do not have the labour capacity to handle the maintenance of certain technological solutions. I also need to be realistic when it comes to 

// the time and money people are able to dedicate to maintaining my design. Understanding where my work can fit into the day-to-day running of the Hall is crucial otherwise it is likely to constantly be put on the back burner until there finally is a ‘good time’ to work on it, which given the pressures on the staff is unlikely to be a regular occurrence. 

// The second thing I need to do is make it adaptable.

// Things change all the time and before you know it you are in a global pandemic. 

// Which is why I imagine a certain level of DIY needs to be part of my work, 

// allowing the maintainers of my design to adapt it to their current needs rather than having to bend to my old requirements. 

// Currently I hope that by doing a placement at the Hall I will be able to better understand the needs and desires of those who will be keeping the dust off my work and then be able to make something that fits into the maintenance system at the hall instead of imposing my development system onto them. 

OHD_PRS_0118 🏛⏳🏺📜: Connecting with history through our screen

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This was not a very good paper. I was very busy and I did not put my whole heart in it, which is always a shame. But a learning moment to remember to plan these things better

Slides

Google Gemini Summary of OHD_PRS_0118 - Connecting with history through our screen
[generated 06 / 01 / 2025]

Challenges with Existing Digital Archives: You effectively critique current digital archives, highlighting their limitations in capturing the serendipity and emotional connection often associated with physical archives. Issues such as clunky interfaces, limited search functionality, and the loss of contextual information are identified.

The "Archive-Robot" Metaphor: This is a novel and insightful perspective. By framing digital archives as "archive-robots" still under development, you emphasize the need for ongoing refinement and improvement. It shifts the focus from simply replicating physical archives to exploring new possibilities for digital interaction and engagement.

The Importance of Human Connection: You emphasize the importance of human interaction and the emotional connection to physical archives. You highlight the limitations of purely digital experiences and the need to consider the social and cultural contexts of archival research.

Ethical Considerations: You raise important ethical concerns regarding data privacy, digital inequality, and the environmental impact of digital technologies.

A Call for Innovation: You advocate for a more human-centered approach to digital archives, emphasizing the need for creativity, collaboration, and a willingness to experiment with new technologies and methodologies.

Key takeaways for your PhD research:

Focus on User Experience: Design digital tools that are intuitive, user-friendly, and enhance rather than hinder the research experience.
Embrace Collaboration: Foster close collaboration between oral historians, archivists, technologists, and community members throughout the design and development process.

Prioritize Sustainability: Consider the long-term sustainability of digital technologies, including maintenance, data preservation, and environmental impact.

Explore Innovative Approaches: Experiment with new technologies and methodologies, such as AI and machine learning, while also recognizing the limitations of technology and the importance of human interaction.

Overall, this presentation demonstrates a strong understanding of the challenges and opportunities presented by the intersection of oral history, technology, and heritage management. Your insightful observations and critical thinking will undoubtedly be valuable assets as you embark on this exciting research journey.

Script

Since the start of my PhD in January there are two things I have observed when people talk about archives during COVID.

  1. People complain about the digital archives 
  2. People express how much they missing brick and mortar archives

I, too, hold these opinions. I have recently started digging through the National Trust’s oral history archive which is housed at the British Library and it has not been the most relaxing affair. Every time I clicked on an entry and then wanted to go back to my search results I would have to refresh my page and if I accidentally clicked on any of the names that were hyperlinked in the entry pages I would lose my place in the archive and have to go back to the start. I also have very little experience of actually working in an oral history archive so really need to visit a brick and mortar archive that houses oral history. The only information I do have on listening to oral history in a brick and mortar archive comes from my friend who told me in horror how they had given a CD player and a broken set of headphones. 

What I am going to do for this presentation is dissect these two observations and explore how I can reframe these in order to use them in my work for my PhD.

Point 1! 

Let us start with the digital archives that so many of us have had to rely on over the last year. Digital archives exist because they are following the bigger trend of moving our lives online. But this move from brick and mortar to digital is about a literal as it can get. When I was going through the National Trust’s oral history archive it felt as if the British Library took the index cards that accompanied the recordings and just transcribe them into a webpage. They moved the collection online without thinking about how this new realm could enhance the experience of archive. Other than the fact that this makes going through the archive a bit frustrating and boring you also lose that serendipity that everyone always talks about when they are in brick and mortar archives: the scribble in the margins, the note lost in the pages of a book. These two things: the loss of serendipity and the direct translation is why I believe people are complaining.

So how do we solve this? To start with I suggest a reframing of what we think a digital archive is. As I previously mentioned a digital archive is not the digital equivalent of a brick and mortar archive because we lose that serendipity that we love so much. So what if we view the digital archive as a tool to access the information in the brick and mortar archive. Our computers, browsers and webpages then become the tools that grant us access to the archive, which is a role normally held by archivists. They are the people who usually accompany us in our journey through the brick and mortar archive. But our computers, browsers and webpages are not the same as a fully trained archivist. An archivist is a human who is capable of complex and creative thought. They can solve problems and navigate around barriers, while a computer is only as creative as its database and code allows it to be. So we could view digital archives as a digital alternative to archivists but I believe this would still cause frustration, because within this framing we are still comparing the new digital archives to the old brick and mortar archives and in this fight the brick and mortar archives have the creative upper hand (for now.)

So I would like to propose another way of framing our digital archives. A couple of weeks ago I attended a seminar on AI. During the seminar, Professor Irina Shklovski from the University of Copenhagen presented a paper called AI as Relational Infrastructure. She discussed how the way we view AI is all wrong. We view AI as a tool we can used but Shklovski suggested that we should view it as a relationship, an exchange of skills and knowledge. So I translated this principle onto my work in the National Trust’s oral history archive. This translation made me view my computer, the browser and this British Library portal as an archive-robot that was trying to help me navigate the messiness of the brick and mortar archive on the other side of my screen. However this archive-robot is very new to the archive; we need to remember that digital archives are the new kids on the block and these archive-robots do not know the ways of the archive yet. The way that I currently picture this relationship is as follows. Here we have our archive-robot who has just started their new job at the archive, they do not really know what they are doing, they might have even lied a bit on the CV. Along come a lot of random people who start handing all their documents, notes, and other bits and bobs over to the archive-robot, who and I cannot stress this enough has no idea what they are doing, and expects them to just sort everything out. This is a rather tall order as we already know that archive-robots cannot think as creatively as a human-archivist – yet. What we need to do now as a community that uses these archives is train these new kids in archiving because in the end they will help us in our research. 

I know this sounds like I am advocating robot rights. Maybe I am a bit but what I really trying to say is that instead of viewing digital archives as the digital equivalent of brick and mortar archives, or viewing them as tools to access those archives, you can view them as an archive-robot who is trying to adapt to this new world as much as you are. It might sound like a silly idea but I can tell you from experience it eases the frustration a bit. And most importantly if we view our digital archives like this we put ourselves into a mindset that allows us to seek progress and development in our digital archives and not just settle for this rather crude translation of brick and archives. Digital archives are still in development and I think that if we see them more like archive-robots in training then maybe we can help them help us. 

Point 2!

People miss brick and mortar archives. Other than the fact that we don’t really like digital archives right now, I think there is something deeply emotional about people’s desire to reenter brick and mortar archives. Even though we might have access to certain documents online, people still want to be near the physical document. Just like how people travel to see the Mona Lisa despite the fact that everyone knows what the Mona Lisa looks like. This feeling, this desire, this need to be in the physical space I also see in my mother, who because of the pandemic has not been able to travel to her motherland the Netherlands for nearly a year now. Just like the archive-robots allow us to connect to the brick and mortar archives, my mother has been able to connect to her homeland via her devices be that FaceTime with her sister, watching dutch tv, reading dutch newspapers or listening to dutch radio. But we know it is not the same as physically being there. She wants to connect to the land. She wants to be in that physical environment. And I think this feeling is very similar to people missing brick and mortar archives as if the archive is their motherland.

I think it is necessary to understand the importance of this connection when it comes to research. Connecting with your subject of your research in an emotional way can help one be more responsible in how we handle our archival material. This is especially important in cases where the archival material is from someone who is still alive or has close living relatives, which is something that is very common with oral history. When we use our digital devices to access archival material or in fact do anything that involves interacting with humans dead or alive online we have something I am going to call “digital distance”. 

Through our screens we reduce humans to a handful of pixels, a username and 240 character statements. This is digital distance and the reason why some people do or say bad things because that person to them is not fully human because the way they are presented on our screens is not fully human – you cannot look them in the eye. Now obviously you cannot look the creators of archival material in the eye because most likely they are dead. But their humanity is present in the archives in their bad handwriting, spelling mistakes and doodles. Physically being with the documents, imagining what they smelt, felt and saw when they were creating this document makes us connect on an emotional level. It reminds you that these are not just bits of isolated evidence but actually are part of a wider portrait of someone’s life. You become invested in this ghost type thing and the only way to truly feel their presence is by being in the brick and mortar archive. 

This feeling of closeness that people want to have with the Mona Lisa and feeling of belonging that people have with their motherland they can be found in people desire to go back into brick and mortar archives. It is a connection that is strange and maybe nothing completely logical but very human. I think by reframing this observation as the archive as motherland highlights the importance of the physical in archiving. It is a physical activity and the fact that it is physical plays an important role in responsible researching.  

How does this help me?

For my PhD I have been challenge with building an oral history archive-esque thing at the National Trust property Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland. 

So, how can this reframing of observations into the archive-robot and the archive-motherland help me build an archive?

Reframe 1

As I said previously by reframing the frustrations of the digital archive into the naive archive-robot we put ourselves into a position where we want actively want change. We are thinking about what the archive-robot might look like when they grow up. What this reframing allows me to do is start thinking in terms of design-driven innovation. Design-driven innovation is a term used by the design scholar Roberto Verganti in a book by the same name. The idea behind design-driven innovation is seeking to change the meaning of an object or system. For example, corkscrews are there to open my wine but this corkscrew by Alessi “dances” for you and plays on you inner child. Similarly portable music players allowed you to listen to music on the move, but the iPod allowed you to cheaply buy songs from iTunes and then curate them into your own personal soundtrack. 

Here we have two axis: change in technology and a change in meaning both have a scale from incremental to radical change. In the corner we have market pull/user-centered design. Here we have the bubble design-driven innovation, where see radical change in meaning and the bubble technological push where there is radical change in technology. In this yellow part where there is a radical change in meaning but not in technology we find designs like Alessi’s corkscrew. In this blue section we find technologies like the first mp3 player, which was a significant technological upgrade from portable cassette and cd players. Now in this green part we find the iPod. This green part is what Verganti refers to as a technological epiphany. 

Currently our digital archives and archive-robots live here in the blue section where there is an upgrade in technology but not in meaning. As I said using the British Library does feel like they uploaded the index cards. By the way, this is not a just people being silly, human kind always does this when there is a change in technology. The first cars looked like carriages and our save button looks like a floppy disc. We don’t like radical change so we keep the meaning and symbols. But for my PhD I want to do what Apple did in 2001 and also achieve a technological epiphany. I want to upgrade the archive-robot because I think this is the perfect opportunity to do so when everyone is using digital-archives so much and complaining about them. 

Reframe 2

So how will I use this idea of the archive-motherland in my work. As I briefly mention before oral history often deals with people who are still alive so looking after their archival material responsibly is imperative. That is why I do not think it is too much to ask that if you want to take information from the community you should probably think about becoming part of that community. And the only way to do that is to physically go there and look the people in the face. This is not a new idea there are many archives that only allow you to access the oral history recordings if you are in the building where they are stored. This is the case with the National Trust’s oral history archive which you can only listen to if you are in the British Library. Now I think you might be able to predict what my problem with this is. The British Library is in London and quite some miles away from Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland. So if I want to keep this principle of connecting to history through physical space I might have to very politely ask the British Library if they could maybe bend the rules for me. 

Conclusion!

I think that what I am trying to get at here is that through these observations and reframing I think I can say that connecting with history is a deeply human process. And the way we do it and the way it is changing because of technology and the pandemic is nothing new to human kind. I think that while we do pursue these new technologies we also need to remember that emotional connection we have within the brick and mortar archives. I do not know for sure what archives will look like in a years time but a lot of it with have started now during the pandemic.

I really want to end on a quick note that I think it is really important to remember that the internet and the servers that the internet is store on use up a truly insane amount of energy and are very bad for the environment and the majority is own by amazon, which is actually a terrifying idea when you think about it.