Challenges, Choices, Collaboration Door: Sheila Anderson (Professor of e-Research Centre for e-Research Department of Digital Humanities King’s College London)

1. Challenges, Choices,
Collaboration
Sheila Anderson
Professor of e-Research
Centre for e-Research
Department of Digital Humanities
King’s College London

2. Challenges
• On the one hand:
– ‘The new professional frontier’: Digital records,
standards and encoding
– Increasing volume of material
• On the other:
– Expectation that all finding aids will be
comprehensive, digital, and available on-line
– Pressure to digitise existing holdings
– To connect holdings across institutions using the
semantic web and linked data

3. Choices: collaboration
• Collaboration – but how and with whom?
• Motivations, barriers, and tasks
• The Academy:
– Digital Humanities
– Digital research infrastructures
– Researchers as contributors to archive work
• The Public:
– Social / community engagement
– Crowd-sourcing
– ‘Citizen (science) Archivist’

4. Digital Humanities
• Fast growing discipline – significant
investment across Europe
• Collaborative projects to digitise, enrich,
and link archival sources
• Provides an enhanced experience for
users including the general public
• Also serves the research community
• Projects can have significant impact and
raise awareness of the value of holdings

7. Digital Research Infrastructures
• European Holocaust Research Infrastructure
project (EHRI)
• Collaborative European Digital Archive
Research Infrastructure (CENDARI)
• “Ecosystem” of shared collaboration on a large
scale with archives, libraries, domain
researchers, and information and computer
scientists
• Achieving core tasks plus new development
• See also the session with Petra Links and Ivo
Zandhuis for more on EHRI

10. Researcher engagement
• Researchers undertaking archival work
can get to know the archives well
• Capturing the process of archival
researcher - notes, annotations, links and
connections
• Blouin and Rosenberg ‘parallel but linked’
information attached to finding aids?

11. Case Study: Mary Shannon
Mary’s research focuses on a street in Victorian London,
Wellington Street, between 1843-53. This street leads off the
Strand, and during this period it contained, among others, the
offices of Charles Dickens, of his largely-forgotten competitor
G.W.M. Reynolds, of national newspapers and of the Lyceum
Theatre. Her work is a detailed study of the way this street was a
highly significant location for a wide range of activities to do
with print culture, and a hub of relationships, influences and
connections between writers, booksellers, newspaper editors,
printers, theatre managers and spectators, and ultimately readers.
The thesis uses archival research, literary criticism, and literary
geography to explore Wellington Street at different times of the
day and to examine the intersection between print culture,
popular culture, the built environment and urban experience.

12. Social / Community engagement
• Offering the opportunity to contribute to users – based
on reciprocity and ‘giving something back’
• User generated content in the process of using the
archive
• Genealogists for example might be willing to add to
finding aids, or tag material used
• Local historians might write and contribute a small
research guide
• Scan and contribute transcribed holdings back to the
archive
• Most likely to a one-off contribution framed around the
users interests

13. Crowd-sourcing
• Trevor Owens: ‘inviting participation from
interested and engaged members of the public’
• Using social engagement techniques to achieve
a shared goal
• Usually around a specific collection of materials
and for a finite period
• A ‘call for contributors’ but largely self selecting
• Variable contributions in both length and depth

16. Citizen Science
• Citizen science: a form of research collaboration
involving members of the public in scientific research
projects to address real-world problems
• Identification with the science and the overall goals and
requirements of the research
• Tightly directed to undertake clearly defined tasks under
the supervision of a scientist
• Contribute to tightly defined and usually moderated tasks
• Build a community to achieve a goal through contributing
to a defined set of tasks
• Requires greater input from the sponsoring organisation

19. Citizen Archivist?
• Adapted from citizen science: a form of collaboration
involving members of the public in archival work to
address real-world problems
• Identification with the Archive as an institution and the
overall goals and requirements of the archive
• Tightly directed to undertake clearly defined tasks under
the supervision of an archivist
• Contribute to a project to digitise holdings or to catalogue
items in a series
• Build a community to achieve a goal through contributing
to a defined set of tasks
• Requires greater input from the sponsoring organisation

20. Thank you and questions
sheila.anderson@kcl.ac.uk