Re-archiving the Individual: British Army Officers, 1790-1820

这个项目将探索我们如何从大量的档案记录中重建历史生活。该项目以18世纪末和19世纪初英国陆军军官为例，通过让档案部门参与通过数字技术重新整理档案藏品的过程，同时根据档案标准保持其完整性，从而促进对档案中个人的更广泛探索。档案记录的数字化主要是在记录本身的范围内进行的，例如，在人口普查或教区记录中转录姓名，让用户从多个来源的记录和时间中拼凑信息。我的奖学金将在数字人文技术方面迈出转型的一步，从在记录中寻找名字（例如，通过光学字符识别或重新输入来源）转向将个人的记录联系在一起。这种记录链接的过程将允许以传统历史技术无法实现的规模探索个体作为历史参与者及其社会网络。该项目将开发技术和实践，在档案收藏中寻找大量个人——以一种为研究人员提供创新机会的方式“重新归档”记录，为档案馆与他们所拥有的藏品互动提供新的方式，并且更加用户友好。该项目是与谢菲尔德数字人文研究所和国家档案馆联合创建的英国陆军军官生活档案，将对1790年至1830年间服役的4万名军官进行分析。通过这种方式，我们将能够恢复沉默的大多数陆军军官的历史经历，避免将知名和经过充分研究的个人与典型混为一谈的陷阱。该数据库将向公众开放，用户可通过一系列搜索和数据可视化工具查询数据。这些工具将能够分析整个数据集或子集（用于了解团、队列、特定军衔或角色等群体）和个人（用于传记查询）。该奖学金包括一系列出版和传播活动的计划，包括四次会议演讲、两篇文章、一份档案部门工具包和报告、三次讲习班、一次数据库启动活动和一次会议，其中包括维基马拉松、促进研究、讨论小组和培训。在获得奖学金之后，我还将出版一本关于英国陆军军官的书。

This project will explore how we can reconstruct historical lives from archival records on a mass scale. Using a case study of officers in the British Army in the late 18th and early 19th century the project will facilitate a wider exploration of individuals in archives by engaging the archive sector with the process of re-arranging archival collections through digital technologies whilst preserving their integrity in accordance with archival standards. The digitisation of archival records has predominately worked with the confines of the records themselves, for example transcribing names in census or parish record, leaving the user to piece together information across records and time from multiple sources. My fellowship will make a transformational step in digital humanities techniques to move from finding names within records (e.g. by optical character recognition or re-keying sources) to linking records together of individuals. This record-linking process will allow the exploration of individuals as historical actors and their social networks at a scale that is impossible through traditional historical techniques. The project will develop both the technology and the practice to find individuals en masse within archive collections - to 're-archive' records in a way that offers innovative opportunities for researchers, new ways for archives to engage with the collections they hold, and is more user-friendly. The project's life archive of the British Army officers, created in conjunction with the Sheffield Digital Humanities Institute and The National Archives, will enable the analysis of the 40,000 officers who served between 1790 and 1830. Through this, we will be able to recover the historical experience of the silent majority of Army officers, avoiding the pitfalls of conflating well-known and well-researched individuals with what was typical. This database will be publicly available and enable users to interrogate the data through a series of search and data visualisation tools. These tools will enable analysis of both the whole data set or sub-sets (for understanding groups such as regiments, cohorts, particular ranks or roles) and individuals (for biographical enquires). The fellowship includes plans for a wide range of publications and dissemination activities, including four conference presentations, two articles, a toolkit and report for the archive sector, three workshops, a launch event for the database, and a conference that includes a wikithon, facilitated research, discussion panels, and training. Following on from the fellowship I will also publish a book on British Army officers.