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

“你很难成为你看不见的人。”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、智力和政治生活中的重要性。这个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、历史和遗产中的女性工作。尽管学术研究和公民科学倡议已经开始讨论这一议题，像阿米莉亚·爱德华兹和格特鲁德·贝尔这样的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，障碍仍然存在。政治权利被剥夺、性别化的社会角色和依赖的经济地位共同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。他们的工作在当代文献中经常被忽视，他们的网络难以重建，被已婚的名字和非专业的身份所掩盖。档案是打开女性和其他非精英历史行动者工作的钥匙，有助于更全面、更包容地理解过去。然而，许多重要的国家和区域机构档案仍然无法获得。很少有人被编目或数字化。即使在有可能进行实际访问的地方，继承下来的命名和数据组织惯例也使女性难以识别，她们的活动难以重建。该项目汇集了知识和社会史、信息科学和数字人文专业的学术研究人员，与伦敦文物协会（SAL）合作，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世纪英国女性在考古、历史和遗产方面的工作及其知识网络的广阔景观。我们将以萨尔（成立于1707年）和皇家考古研究所（RAI，成立于1844年）的大量档案为基础，这两家研究所共同位于皮卡迪利大街伯灵顿住宅的萨尔总部。我们将首次对这些机构在1870年至20世纪50年代的档案馆藏进行全面分析：这是英国社会、政治和文化发生重大变化的时期，以女性进入英国公共生活的各个领域为标志。我们将以最新的信息科学方法为基础，制定一个档案编目的框架，以便突出和发现档案中所包含的有关妇女历史活动的丰富证据。我们还将追踪这些妇女在SAL和RAI档案之外的活动，使用关联开放数据将她们与英国及其他地区的其他机构和遗址联系起来。在此分析的基础上，我们将撰写19世纪和20世纪英国考古、历史和遗产的新历史，这将揭示女性对这些领域的塑造、实践和制度化的贡献程度。在SAL的帮助下，我们将与其他机构建立合作关系，通过我们的研究，这些机构与我们发现的女性历史有重要联系，以丰富对英国地区和地方博物馆、遗产遗址和其他文化机构的解释。我们期待文化和遗产机构、地方和国家媒体、学术和公共历史研究人员对项目结果感兴趣。团队成员将撰写一篇研究专著和文章、一个以开放许可在项目网站上发布的独特研究数据集、会议论文、一个互动公众参与活动计划和数字创意材料，这些材料可以改编和再利用，以丰富博物馆和文物机构的教育和推广工作。

'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.