Everyday Heritage aims to find pragmatic ways to link counternarratives of the invisible and the everyday to the formal structures and discourses of heritage and produce concrete examples of how to do this. Our research design responds to this problem through three interlocking Work Packages which each feature distinctive applications of methods and a suite of complementary research outputs.
This package will see the team develop at least six biographies using the following research process:
1) Exploring place/archives/collections: This scoping and discovery process will involve exploratory investigations of the biography subjects, digging into their related historical and cultural resources and exploring the intersections between place, collections, and material culture. We will also consider histories of heritage management and the social entanglements that have shaped values and outcomes. This work includes field trips, photography, archival research, and consultation with communities.
2) Applying digital hacks: We will use hacking techniques to reveal new examples of everyday heritage associated with the biography subjects. This work is likely to reveal visual and textual resources, giving rise to opportunities for historical and visual cultural analyses to enrich the biographies.
3) Analyses of place/visual histories/material culture: Drawing on the team’s experience with visual histories, material culture, and place analyses, we will experiment with techniques of drawing out powerful and evocative images and narratives of everyday people and heritage and linking them to place and the structures of heritage.
4) Crafting biographical narratives: Developing historical interpretations, place and object-based narratives and visualisations to convey the social life of this heritage and how it constitutes everyday heritage.
This work package will be crucial to building up rich social contexts around the heritage biographies by revealing everyday occurrences and experiences through the analysis of digital cultural collections such as image and newspaper archives. It will build on the internationally recognised initiative, the GLAM Workbench, an open, online collection of tools, hacks, and tutorials that help researchers explore GLAM collection data without the need for advanced coding skills.
Based on experimentation in Work Package 1, the team will customise the workbench for expanded use in heritage management contexts. Examples drawn from the heritage biographies will be added, and tools will be developed to support new modes of heritage practice documented in the proposed heritage tools manual.
These tools will be trialled and disseminated through workshops with heritage professionals and the public participants. All the digital tools and methods used, and data generated through the analysis and visualisation of online cultural heritage collections, will be fully documented in the form of Jupyter notebooks, preserved in a public code repository, and made publicly available through the GLAM Workbench.
The proposed research, and the new techniques and methods developed, will feed into an industry-focused manual of tools, hacks, and tips that can be used to generate forms of everyday heritage.
Assembling the heritage biographies and heritage hacks will involve digital and methodological experimentation. This data will then contribute to the proposed industry-focused manual, as well as to research that contributes to the growing field of heritage practice ethnography.
This work will also be communicated through scholarly articles co-authored by the Everyday Heritage team, including members of the International Advisory Group. The work, drawing from academic-industry collaborations, will explore how new practices and techniques can generate different forms of visibility and positive outcomes for everyday heritage in the future.
