Impact case study database

4.1 Changes to practice in the translation industry

Huertas Barros and Vine adapted the components of best practice identified in their research into adoptable techniques for embedding into an industry context. The researchers then organised and led a joint academia and industry workshop (June 2017) for 25 stakeholders which provided practical methods for enhancing translator competence and quality assessment, emphasising the importance of the process of translation to the success of the product.

Follow up testimony collected two years after the workshop has recorded Huertas Barros and Vine’s direct impact on these industry stakeholders’ practices. These changes – and their related benefits – are outlined in the table below.

| Stakeholder: Translator Training, an online training provider which has helped more than 1000 students take a professional qualification in translation and employs 45 tutors from industry and education. The following testimony is from the Course Director at Translator Training [a1]. | | --- | --- | | Changes due to the workshop | Benefit of these changes | |- “reviewed our provision of feedback and attendant documentation. After consultation with key staff I decided to make specific changes in line with the ideas discussed at the workshop, to the wording of our feedback sheet, which is provided by translation tutors to students on the distance learning course”; - the feedback sheet “included further explanation and contextualisation” e.g. Performance Aspects were given definitions, Error Categories were “updated to facilitate a reflective post-analysis on the part of the student”. |- “help[s] both teachers and students in analysing areas needing more attention”; - “the diagrammatic/visual layout enables both teachers and students to ‘see’ and chart progress. This can then provide an important starting point for discussion in telephone tutorials or Skype sessions”. | | Stakeholder: Hogarth Worldwide, a leading marketing consultancy firm with over 4,000 employees across 28 cities worldwide that provides language services to clients, including transcreation. The following testimony is from an Account Director at Hogarth Worldwide [a2]. | | Changes due to the workshop | Benefit of these changes | |- “created a specific client relevant translation test for new freelance translators. These tests are assessed using our ‘Translator Performance Review Tool’ by our existing specialised and trusted translators”; - “introduced the Translator Training Pack which is now sent to all new translators”, consisting of client relevant facets: brand background and company profile; glossary in local language; style guide for local language; reference materials; - “introduced a new approach when it comes to provid[ing] feedback to our translators. After each project, we share client feedback with the talents when relevant”; - “introduced a periodic assessment in case of an internal complaint or in case of an external complaint (from other talent or client)”. |- “before joining our database, all our translators are fully vetted to test their writing skills and subject matter expertise. Only the best are selected”; - “make[s] sure there is consistency across the account and avoid numerous emails to Project managers asking for guidelines on the above subjects”; - “the translators get familiar with the style and terminology requested by the client […] avoiding future changes or complaints from the client”; - “keep[s] our database always updated with the best talents by stopping any collaboration with those talents that do not meet our quality requirements”. | | Stakeholder: Deluxe Media, a world leading video creation company, encompassing the production of subtitle files for digital cinema releases. The following testimony is from the Team Lead at Deluxe Media [a3]. | | Changes due to the workshop | Benefit of these changes | |- “gave rise to thinking about how to achieve more quality in the quality control team […] at the time, I had little direct experience with translator or translation quality evaluation”; - “putting in place regular group feedback sessions on client rejections and proactive work quality monitoring”. |- “the awareness of quality procedures and the use of software has been raised and the number of rejections for obvious errors has decreased” partly because of strategies stimulated by the workshop. |

The impact of the researchers’ work – through output [3] and the surveys described below – has also extended to further language service providers within industry via the Association of Translation Companies ( ATC); the language sector’s leading professional body in the UK. The researchers were commissioned to produce an in-depth industry briefing informed by the data collected in their surveys to enable language service providers to better understand the nature of the trained workforce. The ATC’s CEO states: “The briefing was welcomed by the ATC and the language service companies it represents, as it provided up-to-date insights into the academic provision undertaken by current and future staff members and freelancers employed or commissioned by the ATC. […] These insights help direct further on-the-job training needs, and form a solid basis for understanding new candidates’ academic backgrounds” [a4]. The detailed industry briefing authored by Huertas Barros and Vine [a5] was published on the ATC website on Dec 1 2020 and was promoted in the ATC Newsletter December 2020 [a6], reaching “some 3,500 language services industry recipients” [a4].

4.2 Impact on Translator Training within UK Higher Education

The President of the Association of Programmes in Translation and Interpreting Studies in the UK and Ireland ( APTIS) explains that Huertas Barros and Vine’s 2015 UK-wide survey on assessment practices on MA T&I programmes, which underpinned output [3] above, “was an important undertaking that made many T&I colleagues across the UK realise the importance of looking at the specifics of translator training provision in the UK. Their research into T&I provision and the different approaches to translator training in the UK also acted as a platform through which colleagues have been able to share and inform good practice” [b1].

In this way, Huertas Barros and Vine’s survey stimulated improvements in T&I across the UK, and these impacts were consolidated by the formation of APTIS in response to the survey having highlighted the need for a peer-support network of T&I researchers: “This first survey coincided with and contributed to the desire for T&I programmes in the UK to collaborate more closely in order to be in position to face the many challenges facing translator training. To this end, my colleague Dr Castro (Warwick University) and I set about creating an association for T&I programmes in the UK in 2016” [b1]. This association of 24 HEIs works “to improve the quality of learning and teaching as well as research on translation and interpreting programmes at Higher Education institutions” through knowledge exchange amongst members via newsletters, webinars, a forum, and an annual conference [b2].

To this end, the President states APTIS invited Huertas Barros and Vine “to present their cutting-edge research on translation assessment in a dedicated Workshop at our first annual conference (APTIS 2018, Aston University)”, delivered to representatives of 15 HEI institutions [b1]. The President adds: “Based on their research, this workshop was extremely successful in challenging participants’ views on assessment on T&I programmes and will no doubt have had an impact on the way colleagues think about the assessment strategy on their own translator training programmes” [b1].

At the third annual Conference in Nov 2019, APTIS officially endorsed Huertas Barros and Vine’s proposed second iteration of the survey of UK university programmes, this time encompassing 30 institutions [b3]. As 5 years had passed since the first survey, the April 2020 follow-up survey provided richer data reflecting the last 10 years of T&I training and captured changes in HEI and in the related industry (employers of the trained students), thus providing an opportunity for educators across the UK to share their best practice and to therefore identify and adopt improvements as found in the practice of others. As the President of APTIS confirms, the researchers’ “initial survey was so useful to APTIS in gathering and disseminating information about existing T&I courses (and, therefore, informing best practice) that we decided to officially support the second iteration of the survey” [b1].

4.3 Impact on Translator Training in Spain

The above impacts created through Huertas Barros and Vine’s surveys and related outputs have also extended into Spain via the “Evaluation in the Acquisition of Translation Competence” ( EACT) project, which aims to establish evaluation procedures for different levels of acquisition of translation competence and is led by Procés d'Adquisició de la Competència Traductora i Avaluació ( PACTE); a world-leading research group in translation training comprising academics from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

According to the EACT Principal Researcher, the project’s first phase “is a replication of Huertas Barros’ and Vine’s (2016, 2018, 2019) objective but in the context of translation training in Spain” [c1]. As such, Huertas Barros was engaged as an external consultant with “a key role in the design” of the EACT survey of BA Translation programmes in Spain, for which “Huertas Barros and Vine’s surveys […] served as a basis” [c1].

Huertas Barros provided advice “in terms of its structure, sections and content as well as the methodological design, including the survey items and response scales, and a first internal validation test of the survey” [c1]. Her engagement resulted in the reorganisation of questions, their rewording to avoid ambiguity, the narrowing of their scope, and the replication of 12 questions that had been included in Huertas Barros and Vine’s own surveys [c1].

The impact of this EACT survey, finalised in July 2020, replicates that of the one undertaken in the UK . The survey provides insight into the current assessment practices in translation training programmes in Spain and enables identification of the main issues and gaps that need to be addressed to improve translation training and students’ learning experience, specifically in relation to assessment practices. As such, the survey results “benefit students and tutors given their direct application to translation training material and curriculum design” and also benefits “translators and translation companies by informing guidelines for quality control in translation practice” [c1].

The impact of this intervention on the work of PACTE is that the survey outcomes are vital to their creation of “standardised evaluation procedures” that will validate the accuracy and appropriateness of pioneering competence descriptors [c1]. Previously established in their “Establishing Competence Levels in the Acquisition of Translation Competence” ( NACT) project, upon which EACT builds, these competence descriptors provided, for the first time, translation competence levels that function as equivalents to the widely used A-C Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), ensuring the quality of translation by enabling consistency between universities and service providers.

Huertas Barros and Vine were part of the panel of external expert advisors for the 2015-2018 NACT project, with the former providing consultancy on the initial proposed framework of competence levels [c2]. Both then took part in the appraisal of the revised competence framework by evaluating the appropriateness of each category and proposed level, as well as the text genres associated with each category and their level of progression. The researchers also evaluated and advised on the main abilities and requirements of the different levels [c3].

Huertas Barros and Vine thus significantly contributed to both NACT and EACT, the success of which has enabled PACTE to access a €253,280 EU grant for a project that will provide final validation for these descriptors and result in such standardisation in translation training: “ EFFORT: Towards a European Framework of Reference for Translation”.

Archiving and building community

The London French Special Collection (LFSC) helps foster a collective London-French identity by directly engaging the community and creating a “common-unity” presence within the national archive.

Community crowdsourcing – through the ‘Nominate a site’ tool – encourages French Londoners to actively participate in the curatorial process and showcase the diversity of their community’s contributions to the city’s culture. Active participation, by which contributors become personally invested in the project as co-creators, is substantiated by the database’s growth to 139 sites in 2020, while the diversity of such sites is demonstrated by the archive’s inclusion of everything from amateur theatre companies, NGOs, and regional associations to medical practitioners, schools, and the Huguenot Society. Importantly, by inviting community contributions, the LFSC gives voice to facets of the community that a “top-down” entity of purely institutional value would miss – for instance, the self-nomination of a site that is “representative of the bespoke architectural and interior design services requested by the French community in London” [a-i]. As Dr Naomi Wells, curator of the Latin America UK community archive at the British Library, states: Huc-Hepher’s “Collection is particularly interesting in how it bridges the very institutional representations of the community with the more grassroots kind of organisations. I think it really provokes very interesting reflections on what makes a community” [a-ii].

The creator of the Travels Around My Kitchen blog, which features in the LFSC, further highlights the archive’s “important” role in preserving “the gist of everyday [London-French] life and endeavours”, such that it is “given a prominence it might never otherwise get” [a-iii]. Significantly, the blogger emphasises the sense of community identity created by the Collection: “the diversity of sites archived gives an interesting picture of what the community in London is about” and helps answer “the topical question: Where do we come from?” [a-iii]. That the diasporic community is connecting via this archive is also attested to by the blogger: “It has brought lots of readers to my site” [a-iii].

By uniting disparate sites into a culturally coherent corpus, the LFSC serves to consolidate the “common-unity” presence of the diaspora today and for generations to come. Given the ephemerality of diasporic digital objects – these sites may only be “live” for a relatively short period of time – the long-term safeguarding that the LFSC bestows is crucial for ensuring the legacy of the London-French community’s culturo-linguistic contributions to the city and its inhabitants. This is especially important at a time when many such web objects are undergoing a process of extinction as the migrants move on following the UK’s departure from the European Union.

Such community building has also occurred via the use of the archive by the French Consulate. Recognising the archive’s function as “une mine précieuse d’informations” (a precious mine of information) in formal email correspondence after attending the public launch of the LFSC at the French Institute, the Vice Consul for France in the UK has described the archive as “une première dans le monde” (a worldwide first) which would allow him to gauge the temperature of the community on the ground [a-iv]. This appreciation of the archive’s value resulted in Huc-Hepher being invited to present her community-building archive practice at a meeting with “the Communication Officer of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development to the French Consulate in London, [where] all initiatives […] to improve communication with the French community in the United Kingdom” were presented [a-iv]. Huc-Hepher’s archiving project was subsequently relayed back to Paris in a ministerial compte-rendu to demonstrate how the Consulate were improving their digital communication provision and better catering for expatriate citizens’ needs based on information found in the LFSC [a-iv]. A bulletin was subsequently published on the Consulate’s public-facing website and circulated in an eNewsletter to over 100,000 recipients, with a direct hyperlink to the Collection [a-v]. The effect of this on LFSC usage is described below.

Impact on UK Web Archive

The LFSC is included within the UK’s most prestigious online archive: the UK Web Archive ( UKWA). Based at the British Library, the UKWA collects and preserves copies of UK digitally published resources (including websites, social media) and makes them available across the other Legal Deposit Libraries at Oxbridge, Trinity College, Dublin and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales.

Huc-Hepher’s work on the LFSC helps the UKWA to achieve its mandate. A key aspect of the UKWA’s mission statement is to “reflect the rich diversity of lives and interests throughout the UK”. The LFSC corresponds and directly contributes to this objective, as confirmed by the judging panel of the Digital Preservation Awards 2018. The panel underlined Huc-Hepher’s “mature approach to preservation which is of wide significance and benefit”, adding that the “long term, distinctive and distinguished commitment and contribution the UKWA has made [is] well presented within the nomination” [b-i].

Further, as the British Library’s Web Archiving Engagement Manager states: “Working with Saskia on building a diaspora community collection (French in London) has subsequently paved the way for further diaspora community collections which are now considered highly important to the web archive” [b-ii]. The UKWA collective further confirm that Huc-Hepher “started a genre of diaspora collections that is growing” [b-iii].

The LFSC has also expanded the UKWA user base. Analysis of quantitative Google Analytics data provided by the British Library suggests the public dissemination of Huc-Hepher’s research by the French Consulate (described above) significantly impacted the number of UKWA users as a whole. Between April 2014 and February 2015, the monthly average of UKWA page visits was 24,616, but when the Embassy published its bulletin and newsletter in March 2015, a spike of 35,179 users was recorded, representing a rise of 10,563, i.e. a 45% increase compared to the 2015 average [b-iv]. The British Library also recorded the highest number of page views on record in March 2015 (date of the Consular newsletter): 115,192, compared to a three-year average of approximately 93,000 [b-iv].

Enhancing web archiving practice

Huc-Hepher’s research on navigating archives with big data sets has been adopted by others working to make major UK archives accessible to the public. Informed by her work on the AADDA project, Huc-Hepher’s case-study on the usability of London French blogs in the LFSC directly fed into the development of the Shine interface (search tools and dashboard) for the JISC UK Web Domain Dataset . This archive contains snapshots of all UK-domain websites collected between 1996 and 2013, a significant proportion of which are now unavailable to the public via search engines on the live web. “Due to the scale and diversity of the data contained in the archive, the [Shine] search interface became an essential tool for navigation of the archive” and made this formerly dark archive accessible to public users [c-i, p.221].

Huc-Hepher’s impact on the design of the prototype Shine search engine in regard to search functionality is evidenced by Peter Webster, who was at that time Web Archiving Engagement and Liaison Manager at the British Library, where the dark archive was stored. Webster states that “it was preferable to be able to utilise what Saskia Huc-Hepher described as the ‘objective power of arbitrariness’. If a query produced more results than could be inspected individually, then both Saskia and Rona Cran [a fellow BUDDAH researcher] were more comfortable with making their own decisions about taking smaller samples from those results than relying on a closed algorithm to make that selection” [c-ii].

Josh Cowls of the University of Oxford further highlights how Huc-Hepher’s work within the BUDDAH project was “especially important for the development of ‘Shine’” in helping developers identify the nuanced ways in which the JISC archive needed to be navigated [c-i, p.221]. Cowls reports on how “Huc-Hepher was able to conduct rich, illuminating analysis with only a small number of resources”: a selection of community blogs, whose semiotic affordances, such as “colour palettes, the content and lay-out of banner images, typography and text”, allowed her to identify “meaningful changes in the emotional position of the blogger in relation to London” [c-i. p. 224-5]. This work “point[ed] to the contribution to research that even a single [web] page or object can play” [c-i. p. 225].

Speaking on behalf of Shine, the Web Archiving Engagement Manager at the British Library confirms that Huc-Hepher’s “work in participating in the AHRC funded ‘Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities’ project helped lead to several developments within the field of web archiving and the UK Web Archive in particular. Before this project it was unclear how researchers might use a web archive but through working with Saskia and other participants we built in geographical and language search filters” [b-ii]. Huc-Hepher’s intervention here thus informed the interface developers of the potential needs of Humanities’ researchers and, in turn, has enabled researchers to better navigate the big data and reap more meaningful results.

Equally importantly, Huc-Hepher’s work on the LFSC is serving as a model adopted by other community web curators. In addition to the aforementioned Latin America UK collection, Russia in the UK and Chinese in London collections are currently being curated. The curator of the former “was directed by the British Library” to Huc-Hepher’s work as an example of best-practice “in terms of very specific community web curation” [c-iii]. Likewise, Jane Winters, Professor of Digital Humanities and Pro-Dean for Libraries at the School of Advanced Study ( SAS), University of London, states that Huc-Hepher’s research has impacted upon her own practice, confirming that the “careful curation that Saskia has done is absolutely a model. […] I have certainly become much more interested in community archives than was the case previously. I hadn’t really thought about that at all […] It informs my thoughts about who we need to involve in research projects, and that you need to look at co-creating with the people who are producing these materials” [c-iv]. Winters also confirms that Huc-Hepher’s impact in this area has international reach: “the Royal Library in the Netherlands is looking at the [Dutch] Chinese community […] following exactly the same idea […] but Saskia was pretty much there at the beginning; hers was the first kind of project which was doing that and that model has really spread out, not just in the UK but outside as well” through Huc-Hepher’s dissemination activities [c-iv].

Disciplinary thinking and learning in Modern Languages and Digital Humanities

As an open access resource that requires no payment from end-users, the LFSC’s socio-linguistically and culturally rich web objects have already found practical use in the languages’ classroom. For instance, a French teacher at one of three secondary schools trialling the archive in their KS3-5 French language teaching highlights how the archive “ offer[s] a different perspective on what being or speaking French is thanks to the authentic resources which belong to the 21^st century” [d-i].

Huc-Hepher’s work in this area is also playing an important role in the broader movement to “decolonise” Digital Humanities and “reboot” the Modern Languages discipline. The LFSC provides Digital Humanities’ scholars with a multilingual worldview that challenges the monolingual English norm in this area. This point is underscored by Prof Winters, who confirms that “digital research tends to be incredibly Anglophone, so what Saskia is doing, considering language-switching and people using languages other than English online, is really significant to get introduced and to have people think about” [c-iv]. Further, Paul Spence, lead of the Digital Mediations strand of the Language Acts and Worldmaking programme (AHRC Open World Research Initiative) of which Westminster is a partner, states that “Huc-Hepher’s web archive is a significant contribution to broader efforts to reshape Modern Languages as a discipline in light of new media landscapes and affordances. It has clear pedagogical value as a new object of study which aligns well with emerging teaching methods in Modern Languages, while also forcefully demonstrating the potential of language-based content for data-driven studies” [d-ii].

Huc-Hepher’s engagement activities – encompassing national and international interventions in both disciplinary areas [d-iii], often where they converge, as with her invited talk at the OWRI Mapping Multilingualism & Digital Culture workshop at King’s College London in June 2017 – has had a direct impact on the change of practice of those working in both areas. Along with Spence in his work as Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at King’s, this is exemplified by Wells and Winters subsequently using Huc-Hepher’s methodology when training the next generation of researchers to use web archives.

Wells has drawn on Huc-Hepher’s work for her own curation of the Latin America UK archive and, in her capacity as a research associate at the Institute for Modern Languages Research ( IMLR), has “been using Saskia’s Special Collection as an example when introducing postgraduate researchers to the [UK] Web Archive and particularly to the Languages students” at the IMLR [a-ii]. Winters states that at SAS the LFSC model “has already been followed at PhD level and it could very easily be introduced to Masters level, especially as we have got that long view now, with more than twenty years of web archives; so contemporary historians need to be thinking about these kinds of things” [c-iv]. Other examples include a Language Coordinator from the London School of Economics incorporating new concepts presented by Huc-Hepher for use in her own project with students on developing a small-scale community web archive: “When talking about the linguistic landscapes I prefer much more the terms on-land vs. on-line than online/offline […] it is more accurate to use [Huc-Hepher’s] terminology” [d-iv].

Huc-Hepher is thus demonstrably generating new ways of thinking and encouraging better engagement with digitally mediated knowledge production among both the current and next generations of scholars in Modern Languages and Digital Humanities.

Enhancing Public Understanding of the Phenomenon of Migration

The Sink Without Trace Exhibition

Sink Without Trace was hosted by the P21 Gallery in King’s Cross in London, from June 12 - July 13, 2019. The exhibition presented artworks by 17 artists from 11 countries on the subject of migrant deaths at sea, with a focus on works by artists from refugee and migrant backgrounds. 7 of these artists had personal experience of fleeing to Europe by sea. Several of the works were specially commissioned for the exhibition and it was the first time that many of the works were exhibited in the UK. To date, the exhibition has provided the most in-depth overview of art being made on the subject of migrant deaths at sea and reflects the fact that the majority of migrants that attempt to travel by sea drown and their bodies are never found or counted.

A key aim of the exhibition was to enhance public understanding of the phenomenon of migration by exposing the viewers to facts, data, and stories that are commonly concealed in the public discourse of the mainstream media, in line with the aesthetics of subversion described earlier. This was partly achieved through the extensive media coverage Mazzara and Ramsay obtained, which successfully functioned to redress the dehumanising narrative of the “migrant crisis” for a diverse audience of media consumers. The following media articles are collated in document [a] along with several others.

The Financial Times described the exhibition as having the “distinction […] that seven of its artists have been refugees” and describes the “heart-wrenching” circumstance of one of these artists in connection to his artwork. This demonstrates how the exhibition enabled mainstream platforms to provide individualised, and humanising, insights into the discourse around migrant journeys. Notably, though the headline of the article referred to an art market featuring Victoria Beckham in order to draw in more readers, Mazzara’s exhibition was given 4 paragraphs as the lead subject of the piece, double the length of each of the three other exhibitions featured.

As with The Financial Times, The Art Newspaper positively emphasised the contextualising of the art pieces in the exhibition, by which “the stories of migrant deaths at sea” are told, via a contrast with a controversial 2019 Venice Biennale piece by Christoph Büchel, who had chosen to show a boat on which 458 migrants died “as a work of art devoid of all context”. The latter article also goes into depth in its description of the artists’ work such that it provides insight into specific stories of migrant deaths at sea, emphasising the human element of such tragedies, where wider media had been focusing on border issues.

The Institute of Race Relations similarly draws the contrast with Büchel’s piece and points out that “[t]here must be alternative ways of seeing that resist the logic of dehumanisation and also avoid diminishing the enormity of the ongoing calamity. Some of these can be found in Sink Without Trace”. The article uses the various artworks of the exhibition to describe the stories of these specific migrant deaths at sea in order to contextualise, and show the human cost of, the UK and EU policy decisions and discourse on migration across recent years.

The Observer (whose content appears on The Guardian website – the UK’s ‘most widely-read digital newspaper title with over 5.2 million weekly readers in 2019’) dedicated an extended feature article to the exhibition which was shared 1,247 times online. The corrective nature of Sink Without Trace on the mainstream narrative around the “migrant crisis” is perhaps best summarised by the following passage on artist Max Hirzel’s exhibited photo series on “the deadliest modern shipwreck in the Mediterranean”. Indicating the way in which art reconfigures how the viewer conceives of the “value” of the migrant experience, the journalist writes that Italian PM “Renzi’s decision to recover the boat was controversial, with critics questioning the €9.5m spent. Hirzel wanted to show the value of these efforts: the series felt like a duty, he says, to victims and their families”.

The above coverage also successfully brought people to the exhibition, as the following feedback comment demonstrates: “I read about it in the Guardian. I am glad I came to see it for myself. I was a bit afraid of feeling like a voyeur. But that has not been my experience. The exhibition is so varied, so raw and shocking in its scope. Everyone should come to see this, especially secondary-age school children” [b].

The above comment is just one amongst many others that highlight how visitors changed their views on migration as a direct response to viewing the exhibition. Around 800 people attended the exhibition and the related events (talks, performances, and workshops) between 12 June and 13 July. A questionnaire consisting of three questions was completed by 291 visitors after the visit and is collated in document [b].

Asked the extent to which their views or understanding of migrant deaths at sea had changed upon visiting Sink Without Trace, 31% answered “Greatly”, and 43% “Somewhat”; asked whether they are now more likely to engage with campaigns to improve migration policies in the UK and Europe due to their visit, 42% answered “Greatly”, and 37% “Somewhat”; while 38% for each of these categories stated that they are now more likely to give to charities involved in rescue at sea.

This is significant given that it affected the attitudes of persons who were already engaged in the subject matter (hence the figures for the “Somewhat” category). For instance, one attendee wrote in the space provided for comments: “The way it’s curated had an impact on my conscience even though I’m aware of the issues”, while another said: “I already felt sympathetic to the issue but it gave me info to talk about it with others”. Others emphasised how the artistic dimensions allowed them to see the issue in a new light: “We entered the exhibit full of outrage at EU policy. But these extraordinary series of artworks remembered the policy all the more horrifying in its human dimensions”; “it made me think about the people and the places. [M]uch more cerebral and emotional than political”; “The exhibition prompted a lot of reflection that will take some time to process […] the show is not didactic… rather, it prompts thought”.

Importantly, the comments also speak to the exhibition’s power to change public consciousness on the issue of migrant deaths at sea: “I think this exhibition can really open the eyes of people that don’t know about it”; “This exhibition is powerful because it pushes the visitor to think about migrants as single persons, as human beings, in a time where medias try to dehumanize them”.

The TO6411 Installation

Along with the artworks at P21 gallery, Sink Without Trace presented an installation at the nearby Regent’s Canal for 7 days during Refugee Week (17- 23 June 2019). This installation consisted of artist Lucy Wood's migrant boat, TO6411; a small fishing boat from Libya, aboard which thirty-six North Africans successfully reached Lampedusa in 2012. Wood’s artistic project involved the solo sailing of this boat from Lampedusa to London, stopping off at various Mediterranean ports along the way. Over 400 people visited the moored boat, which enabled public exposure to artistic communication of the subject matter outside of the gallery context. In this way the work reached audiences beyond those especially interested in the arts or this subject matter.

Feedback was collected from 53 visitors during those 7 days, through a questionnaire consisting of three questions and a space for comments as with the main exhibition. The responses are collated as document [c].

Asked the extent to which the visitor’s views and understanding of the risks involved in migration by sea had changed after seeing boat T06411, 47% answered “Greatly” and 34% “Somewhat”; asked whether seeing T06411 changed their impression of the conditions in which migrants travel by sea, 57% answered “Greatly”; and asked the extent to which they were now more likely to give to charities involved in rescue at sea or to campaign for changes in migration policy, 55% answered “Greatly” and 30% “Somewhat”.

The comments collected spoke to the affective nature of the boat installation and the way it redressed mainstream media narratives of migration. For instance: “The starkness of seeing the vessel, its size when thinking of the number of occupants and the remaining and belongings really shows clearly the difficulties they faced and the extent they were willing to suffer for a chance of bettering their lives”; “Syrian refugees, media, awareness raising through social media affected me, but TO6411 got my attention deeply emotionally”; “I feel I have learned a lot. I have been shocked over the years by migrant stories in the media but have not really engaged with the reality before. Visual art can be so powerful and connects with you in a different way”; “Seeing it on news de-humanises it but seeing actual objects hits you with a force. It makes you sad and empathetic”.

Impact on the stakeholders involved in Sink Without Trace

Alarm Phone

The exhibition also supported Alarm Phone, a self-organised hotline for refugees in distress in the Mediterranean Sea. Over the past five years, the charity has assisted tens of thousands of migrants by reaching over 2,800 boats in distress. This charity partner benefitted from this popular exhibition through increased visibility and financial contribution.

A donation link to Alarm Phone was included on the exhibition’s website, and they received the proceeds from 70% of the sales from exhibition catalogues and 50% of sales from tickets for the artists’ workshops, with the remainder supporting the gallery that hosted the exhibition. The founders of Alarm Phone valued the visibility created by Sink Without Trace as much as the £1000 direct donation to their work raised during the exhibition: “We are very grateful that the curators have chosen the WatchTheMed Alarm Phone as the recipients of the proceeds […] as they will help us sustain this activist project that is solely funded through private donations. We require donations to maintain our hotline, to pursue information campaigns to make sea crossings safer, to conduct research along the different flight routes, and to organise biannual meetings in which about 100 people participate, coming together from at least 12 countries. We want to thank the curators of Sink Without Trace for raising the visibility around the issue of migrant deaths at sea, and for directly supporting our project that tries to make deaths at sea history” [d].

In respect to increased visibility for the charity itself, it is notable that the aforementioned Financial Times article highlighted that the exhibition was “well-pitched” due to the curators being “conscious of the ethics around selling work from their show […] with proceeds going to the charity Alarm Phone, a hotline for refugees in distress in the Mediterranean Sea that connects them to rescue services”, thus bringing exposure to the charity on a page directed towards wealthy collectors (the page is tagged “Collecting” within “The Art Market” category of their content) [a]. Other media articles on the exhibition (for instance, by The Observer and Institute of Race Relations), also included direct links to the Alarm Phone site where their readers could make donations.

The Artists

Follow up contact with five of the artists involved in Sink Without Trace a year after the exhibition – Maya Ramsay, Shorsh Saleh, Victoria Burgher, Max Hirzel, and Tamara Kametani – has elucidated the following impacts the exhibition had on their work and careers [e].

Several of the artists spoke of how engagement with the exhibition had resulted in a change in their artistic practice. For instance, Burgher states engagement with Mazzara and Ramsay had been key to determining her work for the exhibition: “Discussions with the curators enabled me to develop an idea and consider its conceptual and material manifestation. This interest and feedback from curators leading to new and developed work is so crucial to artists”. Similarly, Hirzel writes: “in order to make my work fit to be used in the context of an exhibition, I had to do lots of editing on both visual and textual aspects of my work. This has generated something different and potentially more powerful, especially thanks to the contribution of the curators, whose input has been priceless”. Demonstrating long term change to his artistic practice, Saleh states that the audience “responses were very useful as they made it clear to me that the public are most interested in my miniature paintings rather than my mixed media works so I decided to continue to work with that format”.

The artists also confirm that participation in the exhibition has enhanced their profiles by providing greater media visibility. Hirzel points out that his participation opened up opportunities previously closed to him: “SWT gave great visibility to my work, thanks especially to the international media attention […] which I had tried unsuccessfully to attract in the past”. Hirzel highlights the aforementioned Observer article, as well as the publication of a dozen photos from his series on a dedicated webpage on The Guardian that was shared 339 times [a]. Ramsay and Saleh highlight their involvement in “numerous newspaper articles and TV interviews”, along with interviews with migration focused outlets such as Migration Collective for the Maritime Museum and the journal Justice for All, as a direct result of their participation in the exhibition [e].

Further, it has enhanced these artists’ careers by enabling them to expand their professional networks. This is attested to by both Ramsay (who “made many new contacts in the field”) and Kametani: “By taking part in the exhibition, I was able to present my work to a new audience, work with new artists, and grow my professional network”.