I have been awarded a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (£15,000) for my project “After the Digital Revolution: Bringing together archivists and scholars to preserve born-digital records and produce new knowledge.”
The project will run for one year, from 31 March 2017.
Abstract
The digital revolution has profoundly affected the ways we encounter archival documents. Yet, archivists and literary scholars rarely "sit at the same table," and this lack of dialogue has an impact on issues of access, particularly in the case of born-digital materials. We will run two workshops to find solutions to this overall problem of access to emails and other born-digital records in literary and publishers’ archives.
This will be achieved through three specific objectives.
- First, we will look at the preservation of collections through data recovery (including the recovery of emails).
- Second, we will discuss new ways to make collections findable and usable.
- Third, we will share methods such as data visualisation and text mining to produce new knowledge.
The project will bring together both established and emerging scholars and archivists. Reaching beyond an academic audience, the two workshops will not only raise public awareness of the need to preserve neglected and endangered archives, but also facilitate evidence-based policy making to address this issue.