Reanimating data: experiments with people, places and archives

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In contemporary times archives are just a click away. There has been an extraordinary flourishing in personal and community archiving, using commercial and open access digital resources as a way of showing and telling about who we are. Emerging new contributor-audiences are offering transformed possibilities of a public and popular social science. Analogous shifts in academic practice have been initiated by funding bodies requiring that datasets are archived. This prescient move anticipated the digital revolution that would transform our ability to share and re-use data, assuring UK social scientists a leading role in debates around open archives and opportunities for data linkage and secondary analysis. Before 1996 the norm was that the documentation arising from qualitative social research was destroyed, lost - although some remained stored in attics and garages. Our demonstrator project will secure and share an at-risk academic archive and bring it into dynamic conversation with a related community archive. We will harness the current extraordinary moment where lay and professional expertise are in dynamic equilibrium - with academia equipped to understand the protocols of long term preservation and community archives bringing new energy and imagination as to the value of data and what it might 'do' for and with us. At the same time, concerns about the ethics of visibility/ anonymity/ privacy, trust and the practicalities of sharing ownership, risk hindering the ability to realise these potentials. Through linking community archives with institutional repositories to facilitate an exchange of values, protocols and resources, we aim to develop the kinds of trust, imagination and inventive ethics for creative innovation to take place.The substantive focus for our experiment is the question of teenage sexuality over a 30-year period, a question of public interest as well as academic contestation. We will work with two unique projects. The academic study is the influential ESRC-funded Women Risk and AIDS project (WRAP) conducted between 1988-90, involving 150 in-depth life history interviews with young women (16-21) in Manchester and London. The community archive is Manchester-based Feminist Webs a 'work space that acts as an archive and a resource for practitioners, volunteers and young women involved in youth and community work with young women'. We will work with key stakeholders including archivists and museums, ethicists, youth workers, young people, data re-users, information scientists and data engineers, in order to do a number of things for the first time: return academic data to the community from which it was once extracted; to take careful risks in sharing documents without prior consent; enable distributed ownership using protocols to link institutional and community archives; re-enact research encounters. Using drama methods with new generations of young women, practitioners and researchers, we will develop methods for public participation, collaborative analysis, to enact and re-perform the archive, creating new stories from our data, and new understandings of changes in the experience and portrayal of teenage sexualities over a complex thirty year period. We will create an open access online archive, including advice on practical and ethical guidelines platform, open access tools for data visualisation and analysis, that can be adapted and adopted by others, with the benefit of our learning on re-use, archiving and reanimating; including open educational resources materials targeted at schools as well as and trainee social scientists. Our aim is to inspire current and future researchers, academic and community-based, to archive and share their own data, to create linkage opportunities with community archives and academic datasets and popular research practices, which will allow us to better understand recent social change.