The Movie of the Archive? Showing and Sharing a Study of Young Lives (Over Time) Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists Conference.

The Movie of the Archive? Showing and Sharing a Study of Young Lives (Over Time)

Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists Conference

Manchester, March 19-20 2009

The Movie of the Archive?

Qualitative Researchers (Sociology / Cultural Studies)

10 year qualitative study of young people growing up in UK at the turn of the 21st century

The Movie of the Archive?

Our contribution

• 4 years archiving and opening up our dataset

• Case study of democratisation: the perspective of the researcher / generator of the archive

• Our work in line with Archives 2.0 principles

The Movie of the Archive?

Archive 2.0 & our working principles

• Openness• Collaboration• Participation• Exploration• Experimenting with new technologies

The Movie of the Archive?

Today

• A taste of how we have opened up our archive: website, ‘Young Lives’ dvd

• Reflect on the role of the researcher in relationships between the archive and users

The Movie of the Archive?

The research team

Janet Holland London South Bank

Sheena McGrellis London South Bank

Sue Sharpe London South Bank

Rachel Thomson Open University

Sheila Henderson London South Bank

The Movie of the Archive?

The Study: Inventing Adulthoods

• QL study of yp (aged 11-17 yrs at outset) growing up in five diverse areas of England and Northern Ireland 1996-2006

• 3 consecutive studies funded by ESRC• Rich biographical material: unique window on

most aspects of growing up during an important period of social change

• Contact maintained, no plans for further interviews - but summer 2008: 2 year project (funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation) re-interviewing some NI yp

The Movie of the Archive?

The Inventing Adulthoods dataset

• Digital transcripts and audio tapes 121 yp interviewed up to 6 times (audio being digitised)66 focus groups

• Hard copies: 1800 school-based questionnaires272 research assignments104 lifelines49 memory books

The Movie of the Archive?

The Archiving Projects: Making the Long ViewMLV1 (QUADS) March 2005 - November 2006

MLV2 (TIMESCAPES) Feb 2007 - Jan 2011 • Unusual funding from ESRC to explore creative

ways of overcoming ethical and practical obstacles to creating wider access to the dataset

• Two approaches to archiving: Preservation: Anonymising and depositing case data with Qualidata and Timescapes depository University of LeedsCollaborative re-use and representation

The Movie of the Archive?

The Archiving Projects: Making the Long View

Archiving Tales • Long hours of enhancing and anonymising digital

transcripts

• The researcher as archivist, no longer ‘researching’, showing all

• Not today - the fun stuff

The Movie of the Archive?

https://www.lsbu.ac.uk/inventingadulthoods

The Movie of the Archive?

The researchers’ role in the enterprise as broker and mediator

• a) Securing the idea/ commission• b) Providing a guide to the data • c) Selecting the young people• d) Imagining how case studies would work • e) Working with the film maker to re-tell the yp’s

stories (selecting data extracts for the reflections

sections) • f) Managing the relationship between yp, filmmaker,

filming process, OU and rest of research team

The Movie of the Archive?

Elastic and Iterative Ethics

There is, we contend, a ‘moral space’ beyond the archiving contract. We can’t know all the consequences. However, we can strive for an ethically sound archiving contract. We can have ‘honest talk’ with respondents and discuss the limits of ‘informed consent’. We can thus be morally responsible for being honest about the unknown. We know that trying to achieve democratic and collaborative archiving is a complex and risky business. We hope that in the future, we can look back and say the rewards are worth the risk. (Bailey et al, 2006: 12)

The Movie of the Archive?

In the face of what we might see as a cultural shift towards a popularised research culture and to the public display and sharing of personal data and information, it is particularly important that qualitative social researchers are leaders rather than laggards in helping to think through what are the methodological possibilities, and the challenges, of using and ‘re-using’ new forms of data and new modes of data creation. Mason, 2007

The Movie of the Archive?

Rachel Thomson Sheila Henderson

www.lsbu.ac.uk/inventingadulthoods