Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive: Humanities, Law and British Indentureship

《迈向殖民地综合档案》旨在为人文、法律和社会科学综合档案的发展提供概念验证。通过创建一个精心策划的互动数字网站，它旨在增加公众对专业研究的参与，产生关于殖民主义的新的跨学科学术研究，并为文化机构提供一种方法来装框专业收藏品，以提高公众对收藏品的兴趣和使用。该项目与公共档案馆和画廊合作，管理伦敦大学和康奈尔大学图书馆系统的各种数字和实物馆藏，旨在表明，通过重叠和以数字方式整合契约时期通常不会相互阅读或查看的馆藏--如地图、法规、法院判决、土地登记、船舶日志、契约合同、小说、音乐、语言学研究、口述历史、诗歌、照片和食谱--该项目可以提供一个可访问和有吸引力的档案，使公众对契约历史产生更大的兴趣和参与。这类综合的、跨学科和跨机构的档案主要是数字化的，以最大限度地提高其可及性。该项目网站将作为未来可以进一步发展的记录和持有量整合的原型。这类档案整合的时机至关重要，因为尽管契约研究正在增长，但公众对这个时代的兴趣对于保存和记录时间敏感的资源至关重要，这些资源包括不断恶化的档案记录、消失的口述历史和散居海外的文化和语言习俗。人们对这个时代的兴趣分散在各个方面，档案一体化巩固了大量相互依存的记录和学术著作，否则这些记录和学术著作就会分布在不同的藏品中，甚至是不同的国家。有了这个概念验证，在下一阶段，我们将理想地进行类似的工作，以整合持有该时代主要档案材料的主要机构的选定藏品，如大英图书馆、大英国家档案馆、国会图书馆和牙买加国家档案馆。该项目的主要成果是一个公共网站，采用“综合殖民档案”的方法来管理和展示来自不同学科的精选藏品。该网站是一个公共资源，传播项目数据和项目综合档案模式的概念验证。其他产出包括在赠款期间结束时举行一次学术研讨会，以审查网站的方法和后期版本；为推出公共网站而举办的一次展览；以及一篇同行评议的文章，介绍建立殖民综合档案的过程和方法。

'Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive' aims to provide proof-of-concept for the development of an integrated humanities, law and social science archive. By creating a carefully curated, interactive digital website, it aims to increase public engagement with specialist research, generate new interdisciplinary scholarship on colonialism, and provide a method for cultural institutions to frame specialist collections to increase public interest and use of the collections. This project curates various digital and physical holdings of the University of London and Cornell University library systems, in collaboration with public archives and galleries, and aims to demonstrate that, by overlapping and digitally integrating holdings on the indentureship period that would not typically be read or viewed alongside one another--such as maps, statutes, court judgments, land registers, ship logs, indenture contracts, novels, music, studies in linguistics, oral histories, poetry, photographs and recipes--the project can provide an accessible and engaging archive that establishes greater public interest and engagement in the history of indentureship. This type of integrated, cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional archive is meant to be primarily digital, to maximise its accessibility. The project website will serve as a prototype for the integration of records and holdings that can be taken further developed in the future. The timing for this type of archival integration is critical because, although indentureship research is growing, public interest in the era is critical for the preservation and documentation of time-sensitive resources, including deteriorating archival records, and vanishing oral histories and diasporic cultural and linguistic practices. Interest in the era is dispersed across a range of aspects, and archival integration consolidates a host of interdependent records and scholarly works that would otherwise be distributed across various collections and indeed various countries. With this proof-of-concept, in a next phase, we would ideally do similar work to integrate selected holdings of major institutions that hold primary archival material on the era, such as the British Library, the British National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Jamaican National Archives. The main output of the project is a public website featuring the 'integrated colonial archive' approach to curating and displaying selected holdings from across disciplines. The website serves as a public resource, the dissemination of the project data and the project's proof-of-concept of the integrated archive model. Additional outputs include an academic symposium towards the end of the grant period to examine the method and late-stage version of the website, an exhibition to accompany the launch of the public website, and a peer-reviewed article to describe the process and methodologies involved in creating the integrated colonial archive.