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

这个项目将探索我们如何从大规模的档案记录中重建历史生活。利用18世纪末和19世纪初英国军队军官的案例研究，该项目将通过让档案部门参与通过数字技术重新安排档案收藏的过程，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工作，例如在人口普查或教区记录中转录姓名，让用户从多个来源拼凑记录和时间的信息。我的奖学金将使数字人文技术的转型步骤，从寻找记录中的名称（例如通过光学字符识别或重新键入源），以连接个人的记录在一起。这种记录链接的过程将允许探索个人作为历史行为者和他们的社交网络的规模，这是不可能通过传统的历史技术。该项目将开发技术和实践，以在档案收藏中找到被遗忘的个人-以一种为研究人员提供创新机会的方式“重新存档”记录，为档案馆提供与他们所拥有的收藏品互动的新方法，并且更加用户友好。该项目与谢菲尔德数字人文学院和国家档案馆合作创建的英国陆军军官生活档案馆将对1790年至1830年期间服役的4万名军官进行分析。通过这一点，我们将能够恢复沉默的大多数陆军军官的历史经验，避免将知名和经过充分研究的个人与典型人物混为一谈的陷阱。该数据库将向公众开放，使用户能够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、特定级别或角色等群体）和个人（用于传记调查）。该奖学金包括广泛的出版物和传播活动的计划，包括四次会议演讲，两篇文章，一个档案部门的工具包和报告，三个研讨会，一个数据库的启动活动，以及一个包括wikithon的会议，促进研究，讨论小组和培训。继奖学金之后，我还将出版一本关于英国军官的书。

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.