Curating Childhoods: Developing a Multimedia Archive of Children's Everyday Lives

策展童年是一项为期12个月的研究，旨在建立跨学科的联系，以改变我们在数字时代记录和存档儿童日常生活的方式。到目前为止，大规模观察档案中明显没有儿童生活的记录-这在很大程度上是因为记录和记录儿童和青年生活的私密记录面临道德挑战。这一趋势与越来越多的年轻人使用在线社交媒体平台作为自我记录和策划其生活多媒体账户的手段形成鲜明对比。为了应对这些趋势，这项研究促进了年轻人的私人数字数据实践与公共档案馆之间的对话，以记录日常生活。该项目建立在以前的一项名为“面对面：追踪儿童文化世界中的真实的和中介”（2012-3年）的研究倡议的基础上，该倡议开发了微观民族志和多媒体工具，用于记录儿童日常生活的时间节奏。策展童年研究是发展这一倡议的下一个合乎逻辑和必要的步骤，旨在探索研究人员和档案馆如何与儿童和年轻人合作，以解决记录和策展日常生活公共记录的道德挑战。随着“文件”的日益民主化，重新考虑研究人员，档案管理员和专业人员作为道德治理和实践仲裁者的作用变得越来越重要。因此，儿童和青少年生活的记录将成为我们在这一领域工作能力的关键测试案例，调查保护隐私责任简单私有化的替代方案（Hope，2014）。该项目的团队将与大众观察档案馆合作，开发一系列知识交流活动和资源，将档案管理员、研究人员和年轻人的专业知识汇集在一起，讨论数据管理和共享中的道德和责任问题。首先，研究团队将邀请一组参与“面对面”研究的年轻人参加一天的工作坊，与档案管理员讨论他们管理、存储和分享个人数据的日常做法。该研讨会将为围绕私人数字数据的保护和管理方面的“良好做法”开发一套新的开放获取知识交流材料做出重要贡献，这些材料针对年轻人、档案管理员和研究人员。策展童年项目的一个关键成果将是开发一个新的关于“日常童年”的持续多媒体数据集，该数据集将在大众观察档案馆托管和维护。该数据集将为研究人员提供丰富的新资源，这些资源将为儿童和青少年随着时间的推移不断变化的社会和文化结构提供宝贵的见解。该数据集最初将包括作为Face 2 Face研究的一部分收集的数据，但稍后还将纳入由研究和档案团队共同组织的2015年5月12日儿童“自我纪录日”的新数据贡献。在创建和编辑该数据集的整个过程中，研究和档案团队将严格审查在大众观察档案中建立一个新的“日常儿童”多媒体数据集的实际和道德挑战。更广泛地说，这项研究将寻求促进正在进行的讨论，在艺术和人文科学和社会科学的记录和保存日常数字和多媒体帐户的挑战，以及研究和记录儿童的生活在数字时代更广泛的道德影响。

Curating Childhoods is a 12-month study that forges links across disciplines in order to transform the way we document and archive children's everyday lives in the digital age. To date, accounts of children's lives have been conspicuously absent from the Mass Observation Archive - in large part due to the ethical challenges of documenting and recording intimate accounts of children and young people's lives. Such a trend stands in stark contrast to increased growth and proliferation of young people's use of online social media platforms as a means of self-documenting and curating multimedia accounts of their lives. In response to these trends, the study facilitates dialogue between young people's private digital data practices and public archives seeking to document the everyday. The project builds on a previous research initiative called 'Face 2 Face: Tracing the Real and the Mediated in Children's Cultural Worlds' (2012-3) which developed micro ethnographic and multimedia tools for documenting the temporal rhythms of children's everyday lives. The Curating Childhoods study is the next logical and necessary step in the development of this initiative and seeks to explore how researchers and archives can work with children and young people to address the ethical challenges of documenting and curating public records of everyday life. With the increasing democratisation of 'documentation' it has been ever more important to reconsider the role of the researcher, the archivist, and the professional as arbiters of ethical governance and practice. Consequently, the documentation of children and young people's lives will act as a key test case for our ability to work through this terrain, investigating alternatives to the simple privatisation of responsibility for protecting privacy (Hope, 2014). In collaboration with the Mass Observation Archive, the project's team will develop a series of knowledge exchange activities and resources bringing together the expertise of archivists, researchers and young people around issues of ethics and responsibility in the curation and sharing data. In the first instance, the research team will invite a panel of young people involved in the 'Face 2 Face' study to participate in a day workshop with archivists to talk about their everyday practices of curating, storing and sharing personal data. This workshop will then form a key contribution in the development of a set of new open-access knowledge exchange materials around 'good practice' in the curation and management of private digital data, targeted at young people, archivists and researchers. A key outcome of the Curating Childhoods project will be the development of a new on-going multimedia dataset on 'Everyday Childhoods', to be hosted and maintained at the Mass Observation Archive. This dataset will provide a rich new resource for researchers that will provide invaluable insights into the changing social and cultural configurations of childhood and youth over time. The dataset will initially comprise data collected as part of the Face 2 Face study, but will also later incorporate new data contributions from a 'self documentary day' for children on 12th May 2015, co-organised by the research and archive teams. Throughout the process of creating and compiling this dataset, the research and archive teams will critically examine the practical and ethical challenges of a establishing a new multimedia dataset on 'Everyday Childhoods' in the Mass Observation Archive. More broadly, this study will seek to contribute to on-going discussions across the arts and humanities and the social sciences on the challenges of recording and preserving digital and multimedia accounts of the everyday, as well as the wider ethical implications of researching and documenting children's lives in the digital age.