In the last of four specially-filmed talks for the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS), Dr Helen Rogers (Liverpool John Moores) discusses 'The Revival of History from Below in Victorian Studies'. This first BAVS Talks event took place at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), University of Oxford on 12 May 2015. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rToJag5WgWI
7. Digital Humanities/Open Archives
Connected histories
• Old Bailey Online
• Connected Histories
• London Lives
• Founders and Survivors
• Digital Panopticon
• AHRC After Care project
• ‘Whole life analysis’
• (Zoe Alker, Pam Cox, Heather
Shore)
• Telegraph, 15 April 2015
8. Blogging and public history
@lesleyhulonce Workhouse Tales
social and interpersonal dynamics in institutions
12. Social media &
history from below
The Many Headed-Monster blog includes ‘History from Below’ series Summer 2014
and forthcoming series ‘Voices from Below’ Summer 2015
14. @thegentleauthor Spitalfields Life
Aga Rais Mirza based on
Interview from
Everyday Muslims
From Spitalfields Nippers
Ed. the Gentle Author,
based on Horace Warner’s
photographs
15. Museums, open archives
& social media
The People’s History Museum, Salford Working Class Movement Library, Salford
16. Family & creative history
Mix-d Museum
Black Chronicles II by Autograph ABP
19. @HelenRogers19c Conviction: stories from a nineteenth century prison
Intimate history: tracing individual agency & feeling through social
networks, interactions & patterns of behaviour
20. community history
research & activism
Creating Our Future Histories working with
Ancoats Dispensary Trust to save & restore
building as community hub
22. Students & History from Below
3rd year module @ Liverpool John Moores University
@Writing__Lives www.writinglives.org
23. Writing Lives Project
Collaboration researchers, students & public
To create online archive & searchable
database of working-class
autobiography
Crowdsourcing: life-writing;
transcription; data-entry
Community blog, links & resources
Burnett, Vincent & Mayall (eds) The
Autobiography of the Working Class: An
Annotated, Critical Bibliography 1790-
1945 Minnie Frisby, born 1877 @ Writing Lives
Frisby, Minnie. ‘Memories’, Burnett Archive of Working
Class Autobiography, University of Brunel Library, Special
Collection, 1:250 researched by Billie-Gina Thomason
Project Team David Vincent, David Mayall,
Helen Rogers, John Herson, Claire Lynch
Partners: Brunel University Special Collections Library,
Working Class Movements Library
24. Students, public engagement
& history from below
Writing Lives presenting at Unofficial Histories 2014
Cleo Chalk, John England & Victoria Hoffman, Unofficial Histories conference,
University of Huddersfield 2014. UH is part of the History from Below International Network
Notes de l'éditeur
Thatcher and defeat of labour movement – radical rethinking of social and labour history
Gareth Stedman Jones – essays asking ‘What’s Left?’
Important move to reconsider politics of class in relation to other forms of identity – class, race, sexuality – what we now call Intersectionality
And to investigate the relationship between power and discourse
But in doing so emphasis increasingly focused on the language and rhetoric of institutions and political discourse – turn from spoken word to written and especially printed word where text often became disembodied from social actors
Academic history turned increasingly inwards as scholars themselves began to be assessed in terms of the research ‘output’. The History Workshop became a mainstream Referable journal, now published by OUP.
The debates we pursued were increasingly specialist and jargon-ridden. We spoke to ourselves and left narrative and popular history to those outside the academy.
Most significantly, history became detached from activism and community involvement.
Digital Humanities & opening up the archives – democratic practice
Using digital tools and record linkage to read official documentation against the grain and retrieve the experiences and voices from below
return to examining records of multiple lives not just surviving voices of individuals
Digital resources like Old Bailey widely used by family historians, independent scholars, creative writers etc yet interactions between academics and public still fairly limited
Disseminating scholarly research rather than involving public in production of research
Creative uses of open archives
And that many of us our curators of our own lives, or those of our families, neighbourhoods and circles – through Facebook, photograph albums, genealogy etc.
The new media I want to suggest is also making historians more creative both in terms of how they research and how they engage with audiences
