7. Public histories and collaborative working

Louise Falcini and Peter Collinge

Engagement with the past can never be the sole preserve of the academic historian. In the twenty-first century the issue of how, and more importantly who and what, we publicly commemorate is a pressing concern.1 Yet rather less noise has been generated over the histories of marginalized people, those who have hitherto been missing from the public record. Moreover, the question of who should research and write these alternative ‘small’ lives and flesh out the life stories of paupers, shopkeepers and petty officials, the men and women who were the very essence of our communities, is rarely asked. The ‘Small Bills’ project was conceived, in part, to rectify this by collaborating with archival volunteers and repositories to research and write biographies of marginal figures, producing short histories of men and women from across the long eighteenth century. The broader starting point for the ‘Small Bills’ project was cataloguing, transcribing and categorizing the rich detail contained in thousands of overseers’ vouchers, held by three partnered county archive services. These ephemeral documents encompass the bills, receipts and accounts passed between local tradesmen and women to the overseers in the process of providing for the poor under the Old Poor Law. The vouchers contain a plethora of information mapping the quotidian lives of the poor, from names and circumstances of the sick and frail to detailed lists of textiles, haberdashery and clothing supplied to the impoverished. By working collaboratively with three county record offices, numerous researcher volunteers and academic historians from two universities, this project has created a dataset containing almost 41,500 items relating to the goods and services provided to the poor, a series of new archival catalogue entries and over 200 short articles and biographies.2

The central focus of this volume is the economics of the parish, much of which can be viewed through the presence or absence overseers’ vouchers. But, just as importantly, the ‘Small Bills’ project has also sought to create a new model of collaborative working across institutional and community boundaries towards a common purpose. This chapter considers those institutions and the research volunteers that have worked as partners, contributing their knowledge, labour and expertise to the project. It examines the landscape of volunteering and the technical infrastructure that made data collection possible. It seeks to demonstrate and reflect on one model of how history can escape the academy and work constructively with new partners.

Historiography

The creation of histories for and by different publics in the 1960s and 1970s marked the beginning of new forms of collaborative history-making. Allied to the growth in local and family history societies, these ‘new’ methods of creating and writing histories were captured in Raphael Samuel’s observation that ‘history is not the prerogative of the historian … It is, rather, a social form of knowledge; the work in a given instance, of a thousand different hands’.3 For very many, Samuel and the History Workshop Movement provided the impetus for this new form of history. As one of the early founders of the History Workshop project, Samuel advocated a model of writing history that is participatory and in which the role of the academic historian is sublimated, giving way to other voices and respecting the sharing of knowledge and expertise.4 In the decades since Samuel’s ‘collaborative enterprise’, much of ‘public history’ has incorporated both the methodologies encouraged by the History Workshop Movement and its ethos of ‘history from below’, as advocated by Samuel and his fellow traveller E. P. Thompson.5 Over those same decades, however, collaborative public history has also been shaped and reshaped to suit the perspective of very different practitioners with different intellectual agendas.6 Even now there remains a divide among public history practitioners between those who see it as a branch of academic history writing for the general public (building in a central role for the ‘professional historian’) and those, like Samuel, who saw public history as a collaborative work in progress ideally led ‘from below’ and from outside the academy.7 Between these poles, the public historian comes in a wide range of forms and can be found in many quasi-academic roles, including practitioners who interpret collections in museums and galleries, who curate oral histories and who manage local history collections, heritage buildings or monuments. Many draw on their audiences to assist in this task but are ‘public history’ practitioners by dint of their direct engagement with the public rather than collaboration. Equally important are the many thousands of community, local and family historians and a wider constituency of enthusiastic ‘citizen historians’.

The ‘Small Bills’ project takes the widest possible view of public history, particularly in the processes and methods used in creating collaborative histories. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, participatory projects, shared resources and the ability to reach wider audiences have been transformed by the internet. The advent of Web 2.0, and the participatory or social web, created new spaces for dialogue between the engaged public and heritage institutions. Initially used for creating communities of enthusiasts, this was very quickly turned to practical use, producing collaborative projects of extraordinary breadth. In 2006 Jeff Howe coined the term ‘crowdsourcing’. The expression, which had grown out of technical and commercial requirements, was very quickly adopted by numerous projects.8 Many of those early projects have matured with the likes of Wikipedia and the ‘citizen science’ project Zooniverse.9 These online projects typically engaged hundreds of participants in mutual tasks, including transcribing, describing, tagging and geolocating resources. There have been several attempts at creating broadly defined typologies for these projects, ranging from identifying the types of tasks carried out to areas of application and outcomes.10 Jason Heppler and Gabriel Wolfenstein note how crowdsourcing ‘fosters engagement with new publics, and … opens up data sets and skills that were formerly difficult, if not impossible, to access’.11 This was very much the philosophy behind the ‘Small Bills’ project, though the model of crowdsourcing adopted was, by choice, smaller and more directly engaging. It is sometimes referred to as socially engaged crowdsourcing or ‘community sourcing’.12 This version uses the affordances of the internet to collect data, but small groups also meet and work together, directly sharing knowledge and expertise rather than working remotely, where the shared experience is diminished. This work can also be referred to as ‘participatory transcription’ or transcription plus.13 In the case of the ‘Small Bills’ project, participants both engaged in transcription and were required to seek out selective elements of data, to categorize items in some fields and to add geolocations if they were able. The ‘Small Bills’ project has chosen to refer to this element of the project as crowdsourcing, since it reflects a wider range of tasks undertaken by the archival research volunteers. It is with those same research volunteers that we begin this examination of the volunteering landscape.

Research volunteers

Collaborative heritage projects are not new. Family and local historians have a long track record of working with their local archive or museum on projects of mutual interest.14 The digital shift, however, has increased the involvement of academic historians in large-scale projects. Working together with archive professionals and volunteer researchers, this recent phenomenon is beginning to identify new modes of working and blended methodologies in the production of collaborative public histories. For some repositories these technologies represent a continuation of manual projects begun in an age of card indexes, hand sorting and the calendaring of documents. The affordances of new technologies, however, have changed many of these collaborations, moving from automated indexing to digital surrogates and online participation within a handful of years. In parallel, there has been a shift in cultures of volunteering; the rise in popularity of family history has brought new audiences to the archive. In addition, an increase in leisure time, particularly among the newly retired, has provided a rich source of enthusiastic participants. Archival institutions were encouraged to participate actively in these changes by establishing or rejuvenating volunteering groups, often supported by the availability of small community project grants. This engagement was boosted from 1994 by the appearance of the Big Lottery Fund (now the National Lottery Community Fund), with significant funds made available for collaborative projects. In response, the archival profession began to acknowledge the significant shift in their relationship with the wider community. Stakeholders’ views were actively sought through volunteer and user bodies, and systems to capture this information were required by the new national accreditation system. The role played by archival volunteers and policies in supporting and directing this work is now recognized as a means of enhancing ‘competent professional performance’.15 While archive professionals built relationships with volunteer groups over many years, it is only recently that universities have actively pursued partnerships with volunteer researchers. Much of this has been driven by the research agendas set by the Research Excellence Framework (REF) mandating impact and engagement as a metric for measuring research performance.16 By building on initial contacts with archives and forging new partnerships, academic historians and archival repositories have found common ground on which to develop project-based relationships.17 The AHRC project ‘Small Bills and Petty Finance: Co-creating the History of the Old Poor Law’ was built on one such relationship and developed over the following two years.

In 2015 Alannah Tomkins of Keele University approached Staffordshire Record Office about a small-scale project, using volunteer researchers to calendar and catalogue overseers’ vouchers held in their parish collections. Staffordshire Record Office had a strong track record of volunteer projects and previous academic partnerships, which made it an ideal archival partner. Matthew Blake, Staffordshire’s participation and engagement officer, proved invaluable, hosting a pilot project and embedding it in their regular calendar of volunteer work. This allowed academic partners to gauge the viability of a larger, more focused project, and the archive to identify some of the potential benefits of a larger-scale undertaking. By carefully positioning itself at the intersection of family and academic histories, the ‘Small Bills’ project sought to encourage its research partners to share their knowledge and expertise in forms of co-creation and the collective production of resources. The project was formed of two collaborative elements. The first catalogued, categorized and collected data from the overseers’ vouchers. These often flimsy slips of paper were the bills, receipts and accounts generated in the process of providing for the sick and the impoverished under the Old Poor Law. Then, using the vouchers as a starting point, volunteers were invited to research and write biographies of those mentioned in these ephemeral sources. The research methodologies selected by the ‘Small Bills’ team reflected their preference for close engagement in their participatory practice, while their use of digital technologies allowed for some flexibility around this method of working. But the notion of a large-scale crowdsourced project, with multiple passes over data, mediated by an algorithm or dedicated editors was precluded in favour of a project committed to small-group research.18 Research volunteers were encouraged to join weekly sessions, in the hope that they would create new communities of researchers who were invested in their collective contributions. Trevor Owens noted that the ‘true value of crowdsourcing lies not in the work product per se … but in the process of engaging audiences in the mission of the museum, library archive or research initiative’.19 This process has created the high-quality transcriptions that the project sought, together with a uniform categorization of the data. These have been achieved largely through group interactions and discussions involving the contextualization of material. The research volunteers were very much embedded in those discussions of locality, meaning and significance, and, as Sarah Lloyd and Julie Moore suggested, they have been ‘closing the distance between popular stories and formal knowledge’, using ‘new distinctions, language and hierarchies’.20 Research volunteers often bring these nuances to life, which might be as simple as asking ‘Was benefit fraud the same as pauper agency?’ In the process of this mutual work, the project created opportunities for the research volunteers to learn about the historic contexts of the vouchers, to share local knowledge and, if they chose, to develop new competencies in archival research and life writing. These small, intimate research groups are far from the largely anonymous crowds that participate in some of the enormous science-based projects. They are, however, more typical of a heritage-sector crowdsourced project.21

At the start of the ‘Small Bills’ project, initial objectives included consolidating the archival research group at Staffordshire Record Office and establishing a dedicated group of volunteers at each of its other two partner archives. This was facilitated by developing a project pack, beginning with a description of the volunteering role. The advertising was targeted at those with an interest in family, local or social history by promoting the project on council and archive websites, in history society newsletters and in the local press. In retrospect, more specific advertising, better targeted taster sessions and reaching out to other community groups might have increased the diversity of the research volunteers. Further collaborative work with a member of staff responsible for archive outreach or other partner organization is essential in identifying new and more inclusive strategies to offer research volunteering to wider audiences. The three research groups turned out to be quite distinctive and developed slightly different methods of working, largely based on their previous experience. Most were drawn from local or family history societies, although much less so for the East Sussex cohort; all identified an interest in social or local history.

After an initial repository induction, management of the volunteer groups was devolved to the ‘Small Bills’ project staff. This was done, in part, by earning the trust of each repository, with regular visits and ongoing support for volunteers. Staffordshire Record Office identified the importance of this element when they observed that ‘What this [project] does better than others is the commitment from [the Keele University academics] in terms of the time they spend with the volunteers; more or less every week one of them will be there. It is not just a means to get funding but a genuine commitment.’22 The crowdsourcing elements of the project enabled the groups to bond in a common purpose. Volunteers noted the ‘camaraderie’ and mutual assistance in the research groups, and particularly the input from academic staff. A sense of community curiosity began to form as bills for burials and medical treatment for familiar individuals emerged, matched by a sense of foreboding when a pauper inventory was spotted or hilarity when another receipt for drinks at the vestry appeared. These relationships were cemented by self-organized trips by the research volunteers. For instance, the East Sussex volunteers planned a field trip to a specific parish, negotiating a visit to a private home that had formerly been the location of the village shop and home of the overseer of the poor. The project responded to this growing intellectual curiosity by providing specialized workshops and other training to give this new information a broad historical context. Volunteers were able to share their own specialist knowledge in these sessions and independent research was encouraged by academic staff. Many of the volunteers reported that intellectual stimulation was a key part of their motivation for joining the project; keeping the mind active in retirement or during periods of unemployment was a valuable and even enjoyable element of volunteering. In Cumbria academic and volunteer input combined to take the ‘Small Bills’ project into a primary school to run workshops on poverty and the Old Poor Law.

The move by volunteers from data capture to researching and writing biographies marked a subtle but important change in their role. Volunteers now became users of the data rather than contributors. Their biographies took hitherto separate pieces of data and wove them into cohesive narratives, bringing together their local knowledge and research expertise in a single life story. This was a new and different form of knowledge production. Each volunteer chose and wrote on subjects and people that they found personally appealing or that reflected their own research and interests. The only proviso was that they use the vouchers as a starting point. Volunteers were encouraged to share these short pieces of research with the group and later, more widely as a blog post, several of which appear as interludes in this volume. Through these processes, volunteers were able to upskill, improving their research and writing. New skill sets and information on the historic background to the Poor Law accrued during the data-gathering phase that enabled the volunteers to think more critically about how and what they wrote. Making connections and finding new perspectives was a satisfying element of these new research skills, such as when one volunteer noted that the ‘material represents a national system of which there is a “textbook” version and then the concrete reality – we’re looking at the latter. It’s about people’s lives.’23 Dialogue with academic and archival practitioners provided a sounding board for these nascent skills, supporting a variety of new writing on those ‘small’ lives of our rural villages and growing towns.

Like most volunteer projects in 2020–1, work was curtailed by the COVID-19 virus. Although some online transcription was possible, the collegiate aspects of the project were severely hampered. As one volunteer commented, physically holding the vouchers, feeling the texture of the paper and seeing the names, handwriting and watermarks made the people seem more real. A series of proposed events in each of the counties had to be postponed. Nonetheless, support for volunteer groups has continued online. Legacy planning has allowed elements of the project to continue, while the emphasis of some volunteering will shift to more self-sustaining projects. The practical journey towards forming effective partnerships is not necessarily an easy one, and valuing and including the research volunteers’ voices in that process is an important element of new collaborative arrangements.

Technical infrastructure and data collection

The broad parameters of the ‘Small Bills’ project were set well before there was any detailed consideration of the data collection and management. Those parameters determined much of the subsequent landscape for developing a bespoke system for data entry and largely precluded integrating a well-established platform.24 Capturing and managing the data generated by our volunteer collaboration was fundamental to the success of the project, and dominated the early stages of its development. The initial pilot project at Staffordshire Record Office established the feasibility of research volunteers collecting small-scale data from the overseers’ vouchers. This worked well for the small group concerned, providing significant numbers of archival catalogue entries. The data collection, however, was initially limited. Data were entered in separate spreadsheets with between eight and ten columns, using a proprietary spreadsheet package. However, data entry standards varied over time and between volunteers. As the project expanded following the award of AHRC funding, a set of clearly articulated outcomes called for a reassessment of data collection methodologies. It soon became clear that research volunteers would struggle to record data in a consistent way, reflecting the full content of the vouchers. In addition, the difficulties of record transfer and management across disparate systems, together with a secure method of aggregating the data and regular back-up, proved challenging. In response, a data entry portal was created to ensure consistency in data collection, and to facilitate data management. The new data model included a number of different formats from transcription to data classification and the addition of geolocations. Direct data capture through this online portal solved many of the initial issues, particularly those of data transfer and management; it also removed the responsibility of data back-up from the researcher. Issues of scale and consistency were mitigated by the development of a framework for the collection of structured data. The nature and configuration of these data, however, generated particular complexities of its own. As a group, overseers’ vouchers were the product of multiple hands; the individual bills and receipts varied in structure and format from a single entry to 200–300 entries on a single item. Physical formats also varied. Bills were presented occasionally on a pre-printed form with an elaborate heading, and at other times on a small scrap of paper written in an unsure hand. To capture as much of the rich texture of these documents as possible, the project opted to include both direct transcriptions of all text, in combination with pull-down menus allowing volunteers to categorize goods and services using a controlled vocabulary. This allowed details, including names of providers, payees and beneficiaries; dates; sums of money; and, where known, occupations and geolocations to be entered consistently, and for each line of the bill to be translated into a line of data. The classifications of occupations used the well-established Booth-Armstrong categories. Although this occasionally proved difficult to interpret, given the fluidity of work and occupations in the long eighteenth century, it nevertheless provided a strong basis for statistical analysis. The categorization of goods and services were project-specific, and a taxonomy based on pilot data was created prior to large-scale data collection. This taxonomy used twelve major and seventy minor fields for sub-classification. Frequent and ongoing discussions between volunteers and project staff ensured continuity in the correct allocation of goods or services to the categories identified in pull-down menus. Designing a project-specific data collection tool and adopting a simple intuitive interface for multi-user data capture proved invaluable. Help texts were embedded in the input screen to assist users, together with a contact button to alert project staff during remote working sessions. Over the course of the project, iterations of the tool were rolled out, incorporating suggestions made through the volunteer research groups. For example, the system for locating and editing entries proved difficult to negotiate initially, particularly if the reference number contained a small error. This was later replaced by a tab that generated a full list of all entries created by a single volunteer; allowing them to scroll though and click directly on previous work. It also acted as a place marker, identifying the last entry made by that volunteer. A search function was also added, allowing volunteers to search across any field on the input screen. The results were then downloadable in several formats including as a CSV file for analysis in a standard spreadsheet package. This enhanced search facility supported research across bills for names, welfare processes or broad categories of goods, for example clothing and footwear, food and drink, or fuel. The Staffordshire research group, who had been part of the pilot project, found the transition to this new system more problematic than other groups did. They had enjoyed a large degree of autonomy during the pilot project and now found it frustrating to work in a more formal data-entry environment. They reported how research became ‘more difficult as the [online] database was not as easily searchable as the original spreadsheets’.25 The transition ensured that the new data would be entered in a more consistent and usable form, but it was nevertheless a missed opportunity for the ‘Small Bills’ project to develop additional resources to support the transition. The later addition of an easier method for downloading the whole dataset as a spreadsheet for personal research provided a simple resolution to this issue. In addition, clearer information on subsequent plans for making the data freely available and using them to provide enhanced archival catalogue entries should have been made available.

The data collection tool was designed with the capacity to support images associated with the relevant item. This allowed participants to work remotely and also facilitated image manipulation, allowing the user to magnify the document or as part of a process to enhance the text. These images were created in accordance with repository guidelines, using mobile phones. But the labour of taking pictures and laboriously relabelling and uploading them to the data capture tool, one image at a time, was significant. As a result, the project developed a phone app allowing the document reference number and repository identifier to be embedded in the image metadata. Bulk upload of these images to the data capture tool allowed data and image to be associated. Where no data had been entered, a new record was created. The final element of this tool was the ability to auto-create an item-level entry for each voucher for the archival catalogue of the three partner repositories. The differing needs of each repository and their specific use of the CALM platform required further collaboration to come up with a format that requires the minimum of additional editing on behalf of the repository. These data entry tools were originally designed to support collective activity, although, fortuitously, they also made remote working possible. When COVID-19 closed repositories, a transition to online working was effected with minimum effort. The volunteers, however, found working in isolation difficult and many preferred not to make the transition. Several switched their volunteering efforts to more pressing COVID-19-related projects.

While electronic methods of data capture can increase inclusion through remote working and adaptation of working practice, it can also create its own barriers. Not everyone owns or has access to a laptop computer, and the provision of appropriate technology wherever possible is key to increasing digital inclusion. The difficulties of access, however small, can easily discourage new and more diverse participants. The ‘Small Bills’ project was able to tackle this issue, in part by repurposing some superseded laptops, thereby enabling all volunteers to work online. In the wider landscape of digital connectivity, 2020 and 2021 highlighted issues of data poverty and the fragility of the country’s digital infrastructure. We are now very aware that data services can prove both expensive and unreliable. Therefore, the provision of a free, reliable data connection at each repository was fundamental to the digital data collection plan, but with two of the three institutions providing intermittent public access, this proved challenging. In East Sussex data connection was improved by using a portable Wi-Fi hotspot, with sufficient slots to accommodate those unable to use the public Wi-Fi. The data capture tool was subsequently improved, at the request of the research volunteers, to acknowledge the successful submission of an entry, thereby reassuring them that their data upload had been completed. In this wider consideration of digital infrastructure, the implications of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which was implemented under the Data Protection Act 2018, was of particular concern to the ‘Small Bills’ project. Personal data that might be accrued in the process of data collection was subject to these regulations. Therefore, all metadata identifying the inputter was automatically anonymized at the point of entry, including metadata attached to images; unique identifiers were allocated so that data input by a single participant could nevertheless be linked.

The approximately 41,500 lines of data created during this project are the product of significant labour and consideration of intellectual property rights (IP), and copyright proved difficult to resolve. The project staff’s first thoughts were to vest IP rights in the ‘Small Bills’ project but, as the project is not a legally constituted body, this was not possible and the assignment of any rights to a specific member of academic staff seemed inappropriate. After some discussion, it was agreed that contributors should retain copyright in material they had added to the dataset and agree to license that data to the ‘Small Bills’ project for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). Several of the volunteers were concerned that their work might be sold or made available behind a paywall, and this licensing process allowed all parties to find an agreed way forward and for the material to remain in the public domain. The copyright in the images of the overseers’ vouchers remain the property of the relevant repository, and treatment of these varied between them. East Sussex would not permit the resulting images to be used outside of the project, while Cumbria Archive Service expressed an interest in using the images in their public-facing catalogue.

At the end of a large data collection project, particularly where multiple participants have contributed material, there is inevitably some form of data ‘cleaning’ or ‘scrubbing’. These processes ensure an improved quality of data, providing internal consistency across what could be hundreds of thousands of entries with multiple fields. To minimize this job, and as an integral part of the ‘Small Bills’ data collection methodology, research volunteers were encouraged to self-edit. However, it took several weeks for them to become familiar with the vouchers, their palaeography and the system of input, and only then did they become confident enough to edit previous entries. This turning point encouraged additional feedback, which was particularly helpful in finding collaborative solutions to problems of data editing. For instance, the most intractable problem was identifying previous entries for editing; many were hidden from the search function by small errors in the reference code. The project team were able to minimize these errors by delimiting fields, for example, by ensuring that no blank spaces could be entered in the reference field, by capping other fields with maximum and minimum ranges, or by prohibiting invalid characters. While this did not prevent errors, it did help reduce a number of common problems. Editing was assisted by saving every iteration of the record, which allowed research volunteers to reinstate previous entries as necessary. There was no significant checking of transcriptions, although volunteers in all groups expressed concerns over the accuracy of their early efforts at transcribing documents. Sample checking, however, showed a high quality of transcription. A more collaborative approach to editing, where the volunteers formed temporary pairs, or used group sessions for checking previous entries, may have given them greater reassurance. The end of project data cleaning was undertaken by project staff to ensure consistency in the categorization of data from three counties. The data are freely available from the project and in other data repositories.

Archival relationships

The digital turn in archives has created profound change. Archival staff have been required to engage with innovative digital practices in both cataloguing and processing born-digital collections.26 From digital tools and the wide-scale digitization of material, a new archival landscape emerged. Renewed expectations over how and what repositories should deliver as part of their core services began to shape the ways in which archives were conceived and developed. In parallel, broad conversations around ‘democratising knowledge production’ in the archive began to gain traction among communities of users, academic researchers and archivists.27 This dialogue encouraged many repositories to engage with community archives and local groups to identify mutually supportive ways of filling archival silences.28 This intellectually urgent work has come, however, during years of financial strictures, leaving many repositories unable to respond to these new initiatives. Some of these difficulties have been bridged by grant-funding streams, which have enabled repositories to work in partnership with other institutions, and have driven innovative practice and further collaborative projects.29 Schemes like the Revisiting Archives initiative, developed by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) advocated for community engagement with archival collections. The MLA has encouraged archives to identify the ‘wealth of new understanding and expertise’ that local communities could bring to the interpretation of their collections.30 In concert with academic engagement and a new willingness for volunteers to participate in heritage research projects, this mutual labour has engendered the ‘participatory archive’.31 Some of these new relationships have not been easy. There is still institutional resistance to using volunteer labour for hitherto archival tasks. However, archive professionals can no longer catalogue every collection down to item level. This leaves inherent tensions in participatory archival practice. As Alexandra Eveleigh identified, the benefits in the democratization of professional archival practice through the ‘co-creation of historical meaning’ have to be balanced against their role in ‘subverting’ the ‘power relationships between records, researchers and archivists’.32 These considerations create a profound underlying anxiety among some archive professionals that a ‘contributor might be wrong, or that descriptive data might be pulled out of archival context’.33 Academic historians can assist in breaking down some of these misconceptions by using co-created resources in their research, thereby giving authority to this new form of history-making. The visibility of such work normalizes its use and assists in forming a trusted relationship between archive, academic and volunteer researcher.

Taking preliminary steps in the seemingly complex world of collaborative academic partnerships, grant funding and public engagement is a daunting prospect for any archive, particularly when there are few formal opportunities to develop these relationships. Repositories, however, are able to drive some initiatives from their own resources, with directed showcases, social media posts and approaches tailored to specific academic interests. This initial work, however it is done, is an essential prerequisite to breaking down barriers and making new academic relationships, since the benefits accrued from such collaborative projects can be substantial. Research on behalf of the National Archives has identified significant areas of benefit for the archive, including enhanced impact and profile raising, knowledge exchange, user/audience development, new interpretation of archives, access to specialist expertise and new research, and access to grant funding streams.34 For collaborative projects involving community and academic partners, the existence of a well-developed culture of volunteering makes these approaches both easier and more likely. In these initial stages, particularly when discussing the possibility of a grant funding application, it is important that all partners are able to articulate their expectations. The balance of responsibility between partners is largely determined by these preliminary discussions; repositories should ensure that they advocate for their own needs during this initial design process.35 The ‘Small Bills’ project was specifically developed to fit with repositories where there was a firm commitment to volunteering. The parameters of data collection and associated research questions were set by academic partners and agreed. The research model used limited crowdsourcing, where there was significant contact with research volunteers, enabling them to upskill and to move to the writing element of the project if they chose. The consequent research and writing of connected biographies used a co-creation model, with research volunteers choosing and setting their own subjects, using the overseers’ vouchers as their starting point. This blended model required significant input from academic partners through supporting research volunteers, providing training and offering a platform for volunteer blog posts. In return, one of their partners, Staffordshire Record Office, was able to offer a ‘good volunteering model’, since they knew ‘how to recruit, organize, and look after volunteers’.36 Jason Heppler and Gabriel Wolfenstein emphasize that for a crowdsourced project to function effectively it cannot be ‘left to its own devices nor … used only as a provider of information or mechanical work’.37 Those involved need to feel that their contributions are valued and appreciate being informed about how their work is reflected in the various outputs of the project including academic articles, conference presentations, public workshops, talks to local history groups and blog posts. In each instance recognizing the contributions made by participants helped give them a sense that their work was valued; in effect, they become partners in the process. This is just as true for the partner archive as for the research volunteer. The sharing of knowledge and engagement with the research volunteers becomes central to the project. The close involvement of academic project staff, and a degree of trust built up between partners, allowed responsibility and support for the volunteer groups to be passed to the ‘Small Bills’ project very quickly. This ensured that research groups were able to run independently while freeing up archival capacity for other projects. As the ‘Small Bills’ project rolled out to two additional partner archive services, in Cumbria and East Sussex, the expansion of the project led to additional material benefits accruing to the participating archives: the creation of item-level entries for their catalogues and, for the repositories that so wished, an associated image of the document for reuse. The participating archives found these new relationships to be very positive, and they provided a blueprint for other collaborative partnerships. In Cumbria the relationship paved the way for establishing a collaborative doctoral award, based on material held by the archive service. An additional benefit of the project for the archives was that it provided evidence of cross-sector collaborations during the archive reaccreditation process. All the partner repositories found the collaboration a positive experience, particularly the academic partners’ engagement with the volunteer groups. Moreover, they valued a strengthened relationship between themselves and academic institutions that would provide firm foundations for future collaborations.

Academic relationships

Academic need is often the powerful motivator behind crowdsourcing projects connected to universities. Inaccessible primary sources or those at a scale requiring many hundreds of hours of transcription, analysis or categorization demand innovative approaches. As Louise Seaward identified for the Transcribe Bentham project, crowdsourcing simultaneously contributes to academic research, helps to preserve documents and promotes access to them.38 In normal circumstances, creating 41,500 lines of data of the sort generated by the ‘Small Bills’ project would be well beyond the capability of one or two dedicated researchers.39 But, by collaborating with research volunteers and archive professionals, significant projects can be realized, with valuable results for all parties and creating new audiences for historic resources. The attraction of this wide-scale public participation goes well beyond the cursory ‘engagement’ metric of attendance at a conference or exhibition, and provides more lasting benefits to research volunteers, archives and other academics. As Mia Ridge argues, ‘participation in crowdsourcing should also be recognized as a valuable form of public engagement with cultural heritage’.40 Indeed, among several motivations for getting involved with the project, one volunteer from Cumbria noted their own lack of knowledge of the history of the city in which they were born. Projects that partner with family and local historians form particularly fruitful relationships and benefit from highly engaged participants, many of whom are very willing to share their local expertise. For the academic historian, crowdsourcing also generates opportunities for student engagement, giving rise to a richer student experience as well as enhancing practical research skills. The socially engaged crowdsourcing provided by the ‘Small Bills’ project encouraged volunteers, including student volunteers, to participate in work beyond data collection, with opportunities to research and write related blog posts. This collaborative process often drew on the collective knowledge of more experienced volunteers and archival staff, and on occasion provided challenges in a joint endeavour to discover the outcome of specific events. In the process, this work has contributed to our communal knowledge of smaller communities and the Poor Law.

Undoubtedly, collaborative partnerships support higher education institutions in their REF, TEF and KEF submissions, while there are wider societal benefits for repositories and research volunteers.41 Some of this is captured by academic metrics, but much of the real camaraderie, the mutual support, the feeling of being valued and the improved sense of well-being experienced by volunteers and partners alike is difficult to quantify. As Laura King and Gary Rivett have noted, the ‘constraining model of engagement’ in the academy does not sufficiently value the two-way knowledge exchange that is fundamental in co-created projects.42 Continuing work by the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement to embed public engagement in the wider academic framework has made some progress in these areas, providing opportunities for stakeholders to shape future policy development.43

The legacy of these relatively new collaborative partnerships forms an important element in the development of co-created resources and provides a renewed focus for public history. The days of small datasets stored on individual hard drives are numbered. Yet the intellectual labour of reimagining a project as a digital resource and of creating a platform to support this work, and the resulting dataset, are insufficiently valued. Tangible assets such as articles and books, although part and parcel of the historian’s craft, still form the primary currency of intellectual esteem, with little room for any other format. Digital artefacts are a valuable contribution to the intellectual project of the historian and the communities they serve. This is particularly important to those working in public history who need to represent not only their own contribution but also the labour of others and the ‘value’ of publicly funded projects. The digital platform created by the ‘Small Bills’ project for the collection of data and as a resource for creating catalogue entries is an important contribution to the project of ‘public history’. The methodological innovation that it represents, combining digital methods and close collaborative working, is a new way forward in the creation of knowledge and the writing of the history of the Old Poor Law. The conclusion that the practice of history is confined to a few in academic positions is now old hat, and, just as they took place in archival circles, the conversations about the democratization of knowledge production have to continue and develop in the academy.44 Understandably, this work is hard for the academic historian who has hitherto worked in an environment predicated on personal achievement. Those who have created and maintained collaborative networks understand the commitment and personal investment necessary for such work, which should not be underestimated. However, it is important to remind the academic historian that, on many occasions, they should step back from their role as the perceived principal source of historic knowledge to facilitate the work of those who know more.45

Conclusion

By any empirical measure the ‘Small Bills’ project has succeeded. It has created a large dataset, produced a host of published outputs and generated numerous blog posts written by volunteers. The flexible format of the data created will provide the basis for further detailed analysis of topics ranging from the economics of the parish and seasonal patterns of expenditure to the material culture of the poor. Each of the partner institutions, universities and repositories has made quantifiable gains from the collective work of the project. It is believed that the volunteer researchers – those at the very centre of the project – have gained what they anticipated from the project; indeed, it is hoped that the project has exceeded their expectations. While some go away with very tangible achievements – chiefly, a blog post, hundreds of entries on a public dataset or new skills in researching or writing – others leave with much more: a sense of working for a common purpose, camaraderie and knowing that their contributions are valued by others, particularly the academic staff with whom they worked. Along the way the project has facilitated so much more than data gathering. It has created what Raphael Samuel called a ‘social form of knowledge’, not quite by a thousand hands but certainly by hundreds. All of the ‘small’ lives written by the volunteers are part of a much bigger history, and it is only when these are considered collectively that it can truly be said that we have begun to write a co-created history of the Old Poor Law. By using these shared experiences as a foundation for further initiatives, both the original methodologies and the platforms for further research in public and community histories will be enhanced.

1 D. Olusoga, ‘As Colston’s statue lies forlorn in a lock-up, Bristol is working out what its toppling means’, The Guardian, 12 July 2020 <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/12/as-colstons-statue-lies-forlorn-in-a-lock-up-bristol-is-working-out-what-its-toppling-means> [accessed 30 Mar. 2021].

2 The partners in the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project are Keele University, the University of Sussex, Cumbria Archive Service, Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Archive Service and East Sussex Record Office.

3 Quoted by P. Ashton and H. Kean, ‘Introduction: People and their pasts and public history today’, in People and Their Pasts: Public History Today, ed. P. Ashton and H. Kean (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 1–20, at p. 1.

4 J. Kalela, Making History: Historians and the Uses of the Past (Basingstoke, 2012), p. 162.

5 ‘About HWO’, History Workshop (21 June 2010) <https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/about-us> [accessed 30 Mar. 2021]; E. P. Thompson. ‘History from below’, The Times Literary Supplement (7 April 1966), 279–80.

6 See B. E. Jensen, ‘Usable pasts: comparing approaches to popular and public history’, in People and their Pasts, ed. Ashton and Kean, pp. 42–56.

7 D. Dymond, ‘Does local history have a split personality?’, in New Directions in Local History since Hoskins, ed. C. Dyer, A. Hopper, E. Lord and N. Tringham (Hatfield, 2011), pp. 13–28.

8 J. Howe, ‘The rise of crowdsourcing’, Wired Magazine, June 2006 <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds_pr.html> [accessed 20 Mar. 2006].

9 H. Riesch and C. Potter, ‘Citizen science as seen by scientists: methodological, epistemological and ethical dimensions’, Public Understanding of Science, xxiii (2014), 107–20, doi: 10.1177/0963662513497324.

10 E. Estellés-Arolas and F. González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, ‘Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition’, Journal of Information Science, xxxviii (2012), 189–200, doi: 10.1177/0165551512437638.

11 J. A. Heppler and G. K. Wolfenstein, ‘Crowdsourcing digital public history’, The American Historian <https://tah.oah.org/content/crowdsourcing-digital-public-history> [accessed 26 Aug. 2020].

12 Heppler and Wolfenstein, ‘Crowdsourcing digital public history’.

13 S. Ahmed, ‘Engaging curation: a look at the literature on participatory archival transcription’, in Participatory Archives: Theory and Practice, ed. E. Benoit III and A. Eveleigh (London, 2019), pp. 73–83.

14 M. Ridge, ‘The contributions of family and local historians to British History Online’, in Participatory Heritage, ed. H. Roued-Cunliffe and A. Copeland (London, 2017), pp. 57–66.

15 The National Archives, Archive Service Accreditation Standard (London, June 2018), p. 6. <https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/archives/archive-service-accreditation-standard-june-2018.pdf> [accessed 6 Jan. 2021].

16 L. King and G. Rivett. ‘Engaging people in making history: impact, public engagement and the world beyond the campus’, History Workshop Journal, lxxx (2015), 218–33, doi: 10.1093/hwj/dbv015; B. R. Martin, ‘The Research Excellence Framework and the “impact agenda”: are we creating a Frankenstein monster?’, Research Evaluation, xx (2011), 247–54, doi: 10.3152/095820211X13118583635693.

17 One of these early projects was coordinated by Nigel Goose at the University of Hertfordshire in the 1990s. Goose collaborated with local family history societies to transcribe and index the 1851 Hertfordshire census returns: N. Goose, Population, Economy and Family Structure in Hertfordshire in 1851, i, Berkhamsted Region (Hatfield, 1996).

18 Various formats for crowdsourcing are discussed by Heppler and Wolfenstein, ‘Crowdsourcing digital public history’.

19 N. Proctor, ‘Crowdsourcing – an introduction: from public goods to public good’, Curator: The Museum Journal, lvi (2013), 105–6, doi: 10.1111/cura.12010.

20 S. Lloyd and J. Moore. ‘Sedimented histories: connections, collaborations and co-production in regional history’, History Workshop Journal, lxxx (2015), 234–48, at 235, doi: 10.1093/hwj/dbv017.

21 T. Owens. ‘The crowd and the library’, Trevor Owens: User Centred Digital Memory (blog), 20 May 2012 <http://www.trevorowens.org/2012/05/the-crowd-and-the-library> [accessed 21 Jan. 2021].

22 The Small Bills Project: Qualitative Evaluation Report (Coventry, 2020), p. 13.

23 Cumbria volunteer in Small Bills Project: Report, p. 10.

24 S. Dunn and M. Hedges, ‘Crowd-sourcing as a component of humanities research infrastructures’, International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, vii (2013), 147–69, doi: 10.3366/ijhac.2013.0086.

25 Small Bills Project: Report, p. 9.

26 F. X. Blouin Jr and W. G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford, 2011), p. 207.

27 A. Flinn, ‘An attack on professionalism and scholarship? Democratising archives and the production of knowledge’, Ariadne, lxii (2010) <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/flinn> [accessed 20 Mar. 2021].

28 For a longer discussion on these processes see M. Stevens, A. Flinn and E. Shepherd, ‘New frameworks for community engagement in the archive sector: from handing over to handing on’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, xvi (2010), 59–76, doi: 10.1080/13527250903441770; A. Flinn, ‘Community histories, community archives: some opportunities and challenges’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, xxviii (2007), 151–76, doi: 10.1080/00379810701611936.

29 These funding programmes include those administered by The National Archives to provide opportunities for innovative practice <https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sector/finding-funding/collaborate-and-innovate/about-collaborate-and-innovate> [accessed 9 Feb. 2021], and the Connected Communities programme administered by the AHRC to encourage collaborate working between academic institutions and other bodies <https://connected-communities.org> [accessed 9 Feb. 2021]. Other schemes involve those administered by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Wellcome Trust.

30 Collections Trust, Revisiting Archive Collections: A Toolkit for Capturing and Sharing Multiple Perspectives on Archive Collections, 3rd edn (London, 2009), p. 3 <https://collectionstrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Collections-Trust-Revisiting-Archive-Collections-toolkit-2009.pdf> [accessed 11 Mar. 2021].

31 E. Benoit III and A. Eveleigh, ‘Defining and framing participatory archives in archival science’, in Participatory Archives, ed. Benoit and Eveleigh, pp. 1–12, at pp. 1–4.

32 Alexandra Eveleigh, quoted in Benoit and Eveleigh, ‘Defining and framing participatory archives’, p. 7.

33 Alexandra Eveleigh, quoted in Benoit and Eveleigh, ‘Defining and framing participatory archives’, p. 7.

34 P. McNulty and M. O’Rourke, A Guide to Collaboration for Archives and Higher Education, 2nd edn (London, 2018), pp. 11–12.

35 E. Benoit III and A. Eveleigh, ‘Challenges, opportunities and future directions
of participatory archives’, in Participatory Archives, ed. Benoit and Eveleigh, pp. 211–18,
at p. 215.

36 Participation and engagement officer, Staffordshire Record Office, in Small Bills Project: Report, p. 13.

37 Heppler and Wolfenstein, ‘Crowdsourcing digital public history’.

38 L. Seward, ‘Crowdsourcing the past’, The Social History Society (blog), 12 Sept. 2018 <https://socialhistory.org.uk/shs_exchange/crowdsourcing-the-past> [accessed 26 Aug. 2020].

39 S. Dunn and M. Hedges, ‘Crowd-sourcing as a component of humanities research infrastructures’, International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, vii (2013), 147–69, doi: 10.3366/ijhac.2013.0086.

40 M. Ridge, ‘From tagging to theorizing: deepening engagement with cultural heritage through crowdsourcing’, Curator: The Museum Journal, lvi (2013), 435–50, doi: 10.1111/cura.12046.

41 Research Excellence Framework (REF), Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF) and Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF).

42 King and Rivett, ‘Engaging people in making history’, p. 220.

43 See <https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/about-engagement/current-policy-landscape> [accessed 20 Feb. 2021].

44 Flinn, ‘An attack on professionalism and scholarship?’

45 L. Westberg and T. Jensen, ‘Who is the expert in participatory culture?’, in Participatory Heritage, ed. Roued-Cunliffe and Copeland, pp. 87–96.