Beyond 'Notability': Re-evaluating Women's Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage in Britain, 1870 - 1950

“很难成为你看不到的东西。”玛丽安·赖特·埃德尔曼的观察抓住了多样性和代表性在社会、知识和政治生活中的重要性。该项目试图在一个领域解决这一挑战：19世纪和20世纪英国考古学、历史和遗产中的妇女工作。尽管学术研究和公民科学倡议已经开始解决这一议程，阿米莉亚·爱德华兹和格特鲁德·贝尔等人物也进入了大众的想象，但要全面评估女性对英国文化生活的历史贡献，仍然存在障碍。政治权利被剥夺、性别社会角色和从属的经济地位结合在一起，使妇女在博物馆和其他文化机构中处于非正式的辅助地位。他们的工作在当代资料来源中经常被忽视，他们的网络很难重建，被已婚姓名和非专业地位所掩盖。档案为解锁女性和其他非精英历史演员的作品提供了一把钥匙，创造了对过去更全面、更包容的理解。然而，许多重要的国家和区域机构档案仍然无法查阅。很少有人被编目或数字化。即使在可以实际访问的地方，继承的命名和数据组织惯例也使女性很难识别，她们的活动很难重建。该项目与伦敦古物学会(SAL)合作，汇集了具有知识和社会史、信息科学和数字人文专业知识的学术研究人员，以便通过对两个重要的文化机构档案的详细调查，恢复19世纪和20世纪英国妇女在考古、历史和遗产工作以及她们的智力网络方面的广泛景观。我们将以SAL(成立于1707年)和皇家考古研究所(RAI，成立于1844年)的广泛档案收藏为基础，这两家机构一起位于皮卡迪利的伯灵顿大厦的SAL总部。我们将首次对这些机构在1870年至1950年代期间的档案藏品进行全面分析，这是英国社会、政治和文化发生巨大变化的时期，标志着妇女进入英国公共生活的各个领域。根据最近信息科学的方法，我们将制定一个对档案进行编目的框架，以便突出和发现档案所载妇女历史活动的丰富证据。我们还将追踪这些妇女的活动，超越SAL和RAI档案，使用链接的开放数据将她们与英国和其他地方的其他机构和遗产遗址联系起来。在此分析的基础上，我们将撰写一部关于19世纪和20世纪英国考古学、历史和遗产史的新历史，其中将揭示女性对这些领域的形成、实践和制度化做出的贡献的程度。在SAL的帮助下，我们将与其他机构发展伙伴关系，通过我们的研究，发现这些机构与我们揭示的女性历史密切相关，以丰富对英国各地地区和地方博物馆、遗址和其他文化机构的解读。我们期待文化和遗产机构、地方和国家媒体以及学术和公共历史研究人员对项目成果感兴趣。团队成员将制作一本研究专著和文章，一个独特的研究数据集，在项目网站上以开放许可发表，会议论文，互动公共参与活动计划和数字创意材料，这些材料可以改编和重复使用，以丰富博物馆和遗产机构的教育和外展。

'It's hard to be what you can't see.' Marian Wright Edelman's observation captures the importance of diversity and representation in social, intellectual and political life. This project seeks to address this challenge in one field: women's work in British archaeology, history and heritage in the 19th and 20th centuries. Although academic research and citizen-science initiatives have begun to address this agenda, and figures such as Amelia Edwards and Gertrude Bell have entered the popular imagination, obstacles remain to evaluating the full extent of women's historical contributions to British cultural life. Political disenfranchisement, gendered social roles, and dependent economic status combined to place women in informal, ancillary positions in museums and other cultural institutions. Their work is often overlooked in contemporary sources and their networks difficult to reconstruct, obscured by married names and non-professional status. Archives offer a key to unlock the work of women and other non-elite historical actors, creating a fuller and more inclusive understanding of the past. Yet many significant national and regional institutional archives remain inaccessible. Few have been catalogued or digitised. Even where physical access is possible, inherited conventions of naming and data organisation render women hard to identify, their activities difficult to reconstruct.This project brings together academic researchers with expertise in intellectual and social history, information science and digital humanities in partnership with the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL) in order to recover the broad landscape of women's work in archaeology, history, and heritage and their intellectual networks in 19th and 20th-century Britain via detailed investigation of two significant cultural-institutional archives. We will take as our basis the extensive archival holdings of the SAL (founded 1707), and the Royal Archaeological Institute (RAI, founded 1844), housed together at the SAL headquarters in Burlington House, Piccadilly. We will conduct the first ever comprehensive analysis of these institutions' archival holdings for the period 1870 to the 1950s: a time of great social, political and cultural change in Britain which was marked by women's entry into various fields of British public life. Building upon approaches in recent information science, we will develop a framework for cataloguing the archives so as to highlight and render discoverable the rich evidence of women's historical activities that they contain. We will also trace these women's activities beyond the SAL and RAI archives, using Linked Open Data to connect them to other institutions and heritage sites in the UK and beyond. On the basis of this analysis we will write a new history of archaeology, history, and heritage in 19th- and 20th-century Britain, which will reveal the extent of women's contributions to the shaping, practice and institutionalisation of these fields. With the SAL's assistance we will develop partnerships with other institutions that emerge, through our research, as significantly connected to the women whose histories we uncover, in order to enrich interpretations of regional and local museums, heritage sites and other cultural institutions across the UK. We anticipate interest in the project findings from cultural and heritage institutions, local and national media, and academic and public history researchers.Team members will produce a research monograph and articles, a unique research dataset published under open-license in a project website, conference papers, a programme of interactive public engagement events and digital creative materials that can be adapted and reused to enrich education and outreach in museums and heritage institutions.