Animating archival histories
- Submitting institution
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The University of Reading
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 93364
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- A collection of creative and critical works
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2020
- URL
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https://research.reading.ac.uk/REF2021-UOA33-multi-component-output-5-Murjas
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The project comprises three linked outputs, created over 5+ years. For The First World War in Biscuits, Murjas selected from a 4,000+ item museum collection and produced a multimedia exhibition comprising three video films, three edited audio interviews and selected objects and contextualising materials in two museum cases. The War Child website allows the user to navigate through combinations of video, audio extracts, photographic images and text selected from 100+ boxes of primary materials, with reflection on the research process. Biscuit Town is a conventional scholarly output explaining and theorising the research process and significance of the other two components.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The portfolio comprises three synergistic outputs, forming one discrete project. It was created under the auspices of Reading Connections: Reading at War, an ACE-funded collaboration between the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) and Reading Museum.
The portfolio items are:
1. An exhibition, The First World War in Biscuits (2014), shown in Reading Museum and The Minories, Colchester;
2. A web-resource, War Child: Meditating on an Archive (2016);
3. An article, ‘The Biscuit Town’: Digital Practice, Spatiality and Discoverability in Reading’s Heritage Sector, published in Journal of Media Practice (2020).
Item 3 documents and reflects on Items 1 and 2, which use Reading-based archives as sites for praxis; the Huntley & Palmers Collection and the Evacuee Archive.
Drawing on these contexts and resources, the project develops critical and practical methodologies for both generating and curating ‘histories from below’. In their AHRC Connected Communities document, referring to the heritage sector, Myles and Grosvenor suggest that ‘histories from below are facilitated when archivists, curators and researchers see archiving […] as […] a shared […] participatory process [involving] broadening definitions of sources and evidence’ […] (2018: 29) They note that ‘central to many attempts to build collaborative research practices is a turn towards […] arts methodologies in order to engage with different forms of knowledge’. (2018: 6) This project exemplifies that turn. Motivated by the heritage sector priority of discoverability, each portfolio item explores how archival traces can come into meaning through cross-sector creative praxis; each one addresses research problems of remediating archival objects and documents for different audiences. All three portfolio items are as much meditations on the challenges and opportunities of animating the archive as they are examples of doing so. Thus, they seek to extend cross-disciplinary, cross-sector debates and practices that address how individual and community memory can be articulated.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -