Everyday Heritage Project: 2022 Public Workshop and Symposium
Written by Steve Brown and Sharpay Wu, 30 November 2022
Hosted by the University of Canberra, the Everyday Heritage project held its first get together of project members, as well as two public events, in the week of 7 November 2022 in Canberra. The public events were: (1) Everyday Heritage Hacks Workshop: Connecting people and place; and (2) Everyday Heritage Symposium: Connecting archives, people, and place. The Workshop and Symposium aimed to generate conversations amongst academic researchers, industry professionals, and community members, and explore the concept of everyday heritage and how digital humanities are used in current heritage practices.
Everyday Heritage is an ARC funded Linkage Project exploring ordinary and overlooked forms of Australian heritage. Professor Tracy Ireland, University of Canberra, is the project’s Lead Chief Investigator.
Associate Professor Tim Sherratt (University of Canberra) and Dr Kate Bagnall (University of Tasmania) led the Everyday Heritage Workshop, in which they introduced 22 participants to building online narratives using Trove, GLAM Workbench, Zotero, MapWarper, StoryMapJS, and GitHub. Participants included members of community organisations, local volunteers, heritage consultants, government employees, researchers, and PhD candidates. The Workshop supported participants in finding, capturing, enriching, and sharing data from various online sources to build stories that highlight everyday experiences and contextualise them within time and space. At the end of the Workshop, several of the participants bravely shared with the group their online stories and talked about the benefits of the work.
You can find Tim’s Trove newspaper tips and tricks presentation here.
The Everyday Heritage Symposium took place at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia during the afternoon of 10 November and was followed by a networking function. The Symposium explored the concept of ‘everyday heritage’ and how professionals, academics, and communities engage with the values of everyday life and lived experience. It also considered engagements between history and heritage, and the abilities of those fields to illuminate the ordinary, quotidian, banal, and ‘normal’. The presenters and panellists at the symposium included historians (Professor Jane Lydon; Dr Kate Bagnall), heritage researchers (Professor Tracy Ireland; Dr Steve Brown; Ashley Harrison), digital practitioners (Associate Professor Tim Sherratt; Rebecca Hawcroft), artists (Dr Ursula Frederick; Associate Professor Martyn Jolly), an industry practitioner / urban planner (Sharon Veale), and an architect researcher (Dr Cristina Garduño Freeman).
The Symposium provided opportunities to engage with current heritage thinking and discuss a range of methods and tools that can make ordinary people from the past visible and create value around everyday experiences and places in the present. The event included two panel discussions: one on ‘Visualising the Everyday’, and the other looking at ways in which the digital interacts with, responds to, and can create places. Both panels touched on the ways that heritage collections and archives can be mobilised as part of our everyday interactions.
The recording of the symposium (2-hours-30-minutes) can be accessed here.
The 2022 Everyday Heritage activities marked an exciting moment in the Everyday Heritage project as they were the first in a series of annual events to be held around Australia. Watch out for information about the next Everyday Heritage participatory activities, scheduled for Sydney in July 2023.
