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

策划童年是一项为期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。迄今为止，关于儿童生活的记录在《大众观察档案》中明显缺失，这在很大程度上是由于记录和记录儿童和年轻人生活的亲密记录所面临的伦理挑战。这种趋势与年轻人越来越多地使用在线社交媒体平台作为自我记录和策划他们生活的多媒体账户形成鲜明对比。为了应对这些趋势，该研究促进了年轻人的私人数字数据实践与寻求记录日常生活的公共档案之间的对话。该项目建立在之前的一项名为“面对面：追踪儿童文化世界中的真实和中介”（2012-3）的研究计划的基础上，该计划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。“整理童年”研究是该计划发展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，以解决记录和整理日常生活公共记录的伦理挑战。随着“文献”的日益民主化，重新考虑研究者、档案保管员和专业人员作为道德治理和实践仲裁者的角色变得越来越重要。因此，儿童和年轻人的生活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）。项目团队将与大众观测档案馆合作，开展一系列知识交流活动和资源，将档案工作者、研究人员和年轻人的专业知识聚集在一起，围绕管理和共享数据的道德和责任问题。首先，研究小组将邀请一组参与“面对面”研究的年轻人参加一个为期一天的研讨会，与档案管理员讨论他们日常管理、存储和分享个人数据的做法。然后，该研讨会将在围绕私人数字数据管理的“良好实践”开发一套新的开放获取知识交流材料方面做出关键贡献，目标群体是年轻人、档案工作者和研究人员。“童年策展”项目的一个关键成果将是开发一个新的、正在进行的“日常童年”多媒体数据集，该数据集将由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，为儿童和青年随时间变化的社会和文化配置提供宝贵的见解。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，但随后也将纳入2015年5月12日由研究和档案团队共同组织的儿童“自我记录日”的新数据贡献。在创建和编译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关于“日常童年”的新多媒体数据集的实践和伦理挑战。更广泛地说，这项研究将寻求为艺术、人文和社会科学领域正在进行的讨论做出贡献，这些讨论涉及记录和保存日常生活的数字和多媒体记录的挑战，以及研究和记录数字时代儿童生活的更广泛的伦理影响。

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.