‘At the Court of King George’ and the Georgian Papers programme

‘At the Court of King George: Exploring the Royal Archives’⁵ (henceforth CKG) was created in 2017 as one of a suite of so-called ‘opportunity modules’ to be delivered in the Arts and Humanities faculty at King’s College London. The modules were required to be interdisciplinary and sit outside department teaching offers, to accommodate experimentation in teaching and assessment, to reflect key themes in the scholarly life of the College and explicitly to promise students who selected them an expansion of their skill-set. This gave Arthur Burns a long-desired opportunity to create a module which would aim to bring students into the exciting world of collaborative humanities research, which had been an unusually strong feature of his own career. Ideally such a module should also help them to understand the way knowledge was produced out of an archive, and would emphasise the centrality of public history to any proper understanding of the historian’s craft. Furthermore, the module would give students the opportunity to explore and experience the power of the digital in changing the way historians work. Thus it was important to use not cutting-edge but fairly basic – and thus accessible and inclusive – digital tools to develop critical approaches towards using archival catalogues, online presentation and website design, which would allow students to advance the research agenda and create knowledge through computation and visualisation, and to be creative in communicating their ideas electronically, liberated from the constraints of text on sequential pages but having to consider new issues such as usability.⁶

Arthur identified the perfect foundation for this module in the Georgian Papers programme (henceforth GPP).⁷ This project, launched by Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor in 2015, was a unique collaboration between King’s College London and the Royal Collection Trust, joined by primary US partners the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and William & Mary, with additional contributions from the Library of Congress, Mount Vernon and the Sons of the American Revolution. Its aim was to digitise, conserve, catalogue, transcribe, interpret and disseminate some 425,000 pages (65,000 items) in the Royal Archives and Royal Library relating to the period 1714–1837. In 2017 Arthur had become one of two academic directors of the programme, alongside Karin Wulf, then-executive director of the Omohundro Institute, taking responsibility for both the academic and public programming for the project in collaboration with Oliver Walton, a historian based in the Royal Archives as GPP Coordinator. All three were working with colleagues at the Royal Archives, William & Mary and King’s Digital Laboratory on scholarly support for the digitisation and transcription programme under the oversight of Royal Archives Manager Bill Stockting and Patricia Methven, the former archivist of King’s College London.⁸

The programme owed its origins in part to the Royal Collection Trust’s recognition that the Georgian Papers in the Round Tower at Windsor were an underused resource. This was partly because there was no proper catalogue, but also reflected the fact that their nature was widely misunderstood. Although some 15 per cent had previously been published, the editions mainly focused on a narrow, predominantly political, subset of the whole collection. In seeking to make the whole collection accessible, the GPP helped transform understanding of it. Alongside – and in some cases to make possible – the cataloguing of the collection, the project partners sponsored an extensive and sustained programme of scholarly investigation of the archive through active research, leading to the creation of a network of over sixty GPP fellows who have each pursued their own highly varied projects in the Windsor archives, reporting back to the archivists on their findings and approaches, as well as sharing insights with each other and the project team at a series of workshops and public events.⁹

The Georgian Papers at Windsor are extensive, rich and diverse. While the largest single sections are those for the reigns of George III and George IV, the papers’ chronological span extends from 1714 through to 1837. Monarchs loom large throughout, but there are papers relating to many other members of the royal family, notably royal women. They offer important materials on eighteenth-century medicine (including the reports, correspondence and other papers of the doctors who treated George III during his ‘madness’), education, politics, cultural life and foreign affairs. There are courtiers’ papers, financial papers and documents relating to the court, royal residences and household administration. The cast list is extensive. The contents are roughly classified in Figure 1.1; it should be remembered that with over 400,000 pages, even small slices of this pie chart can represent large numbers of documents.

The GPP therefore offered an ideal platform for a module of the kind envisaged. Although strongly associated with the court, this single archive offered a very wide range of documents and objects (from books to bundles of hair) which could support research into widely differing aspects of eighteenth-century history; it had a strong international research community already associated with it drawn from a variety of disciplines and sub-disciplines; and it had a community of archivists, librarians and cataloguers with considerable familiarity with the collection as a whole, which the wider project team was also gradually acquiring. Finally, it had a strong and varied outreach and impact agenda, with regular coverage in the press (even featuring at one point in Hello magazine), work with the Royal Mint and the Library of Congress, two major TV documentaries, and collaborations with two important stage productions during the course of the project: the West End production of Hamilton: An American Musical and the Nottingham Playhouse production of The Madness of George III, which was then selected by the National Theatre (NT) for an NT Live showing, recycled as part of NT at Home during the COVID-19 pandemic. These collaborations could not only excite students who saw evidence of the impact of the project with which they were associated beyond the university but also help them to think imaginatively about how historical research could make its way from an academic project into the wider public realm, and how their own work could find expression in ways that might also have potential in this regard.

Design principles

In conversations with Oliver and other colleagues, Arthur now sought to design a module that would reflect both the archive on which it was based and the learning objectives that had been established. Since the module had to be made available to students on different disciplinary programmes, it was likely that it would set a demanding challenge to students, especially those who were not historians: in one sense we would need to find a way to make them all historians, capable of researching content for a historical project, not least the ‘facts’ that underpinned it, even if their own discipline’s skills could also be deployed.

It was decided that we should start with the documents in the archive. We should aim to introduce students to the full range of skills involved in presenting such documents to a variety of audiences. Central to this should be preparing some form of edition of a particular document or set of documents; indeed, we both believe editing has a rather undervalued place in historical training, not least because it demands both precision and rigour. The final choice of the document could be left in the student’s hands but with the support of the module tutor(s): part of the challenge and also part of the excitement of the module would be getting students to select documents from among those digitised by the GPP that suited their own interests and skills, making it more likely that they would have the necessary enthusiasm to complete the project. It would also be the student’s decision as to what sort of audience they wanted to work towards: we would encourage everything from a serious academic treatment to projects aimed at a wider public or school audience. The only common factor was that at the heart would be a digital and accurate presentation of the document(s) or object, accompanied by a transcription. Given the parallels between this and the GPP’s own activity, this would be part of a wider aim of making students feel they were actively part of the project, rather than simply watching it from the sidelines, or indeed having things handed to them on a plate. Finally, again, very importantly to Arthur because of his long involvement in promoting history as a discipline of key importance in schools and universities as a source of highly desirable life and work skills, there should be opportunities in the module for the students to recognise the transferability beyond the academy of the skills they were acquiring and deploying in the course of the module.¹⁰

Delivering CKG

As eventually implemented, CKG became a final-year undergraduate module delivered over ten weeks, with a series of two-hour seminars capped off by a three-hour workshop in which each student presented their work in progress. For a number of the seminars the module lead tutor was joined by colleagues with appropriate expertise, thus modelling the collaborative spirit underpinning the module.¹¹ Oliver led sessions introducing the archive and training students in how to navigate and describe archival resources, as well as workshopping academic issues later in the module and co-assessing student work; for two sessions, concentrating on the digital skills involved in mounting the edition (on which more below), we were joined by a technology specialist from the faculty.¹² (In 2021 circumstances forced a role-reversal, with Oliver leading the module and Arthur making cameo appearances.) The edition constituted 90 per cent of the module’s assessment, the other 10 per cent being derived from a group presentation at the halfway point in the module.

The module is supported by a very extensive virtual learning environment, which came into its own when the module had to be delivered online in pandemic conditions. As well as resources for each class, there is a huge range of resources which can be employed in the final editions, such as digitised maps and timelines on which events can be plotted, links to other internet resources relevant to the period (such as the public databases mentioned above) and other collections of digitised sources, major library and archival catalogues, recorded interviews with a number of scholars associated with the programme (concerning, for example, the monarchy’s Hanoverian possessions, the court at the royal palaces, George III and his daughters), and an online archive of TV documentaries (including but not confined to those involving the GPP), films and plays which might inform and support the students’ learning. Most importantly, there is also a bibliography of more than 400 items selected from the Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History, accompanied by a set of short biographies of the key contributors to the historiography.

The delivery of the module had several distinctive features. Perhaps most strikingly, given the differences in prior exposure to history of the students taking the module, there was no direct teaching at all of the history of the Georgian monarchy or period aside from short introductions to both at the start of the very first seminar. Instead, in the first two sessions students were asked to tell the module tutors what they knew about George III, and to suggest the kind of topics that they might find interesting in the Georgian period more generally through delivering short presentations to the class about objects or images which encapsulated those themes (with the tutors also taking part in the exercise to emphasise that all were embarking on a journey of discovery together).

The teaching over the first half of the module focused on techniques and approaches. After an exploration of the GPP website’s own resources, and the catalogue of the Georgian Papers maintained on the Royal Collection Trust website through which the digitised images are accessed,¹³ there followed detailed introductions and exercises in exploring, interrogating and retrieving items from an archive, whether physical or digital; a discussion of the key objectives in creating editions for different types of audience; an introduction to palaeography and the tricks of the trade in reading eighteenth-century hands; and a discussion of how to research material effectively for contextualisation or annotation of a document or object. In the age of Google, students are often blithely unaware that search results retrieved in this manner are ripped asunder from their context. But for historical scholarship, of course, context is everything. We therefore invested time in teaching the students how to bridge the imaginative and intellectual gap between the digital surrogates they were working with and the archival and material realities of the original documents. In week five of the module students discussed with the tutor(s) their initial thoughts on document selection, receiving guidance on whether or not the document(s)/object(s) would present particular challenges, how to explore the themes that seemed most appropriate to the edition and the type of edition they hoped to produce. At this point the tutors assured themselves that the project was not either over- or under-ambitious, suggesting ways to refine the choice of document(s) as required.

All of these skills were initially put to use in the group projects. For these the students were divided up, on the basis of the interests they had declared in the initial sessions, to work together on a class presentation of a document selected by the tutors to reflect those interests. The groups then remained in place for the remainder of the course as peer-support groups for the individual editions. More generally, the students were encouraged to take note of fellow students’ strengths, and to seek help from each other on issues such as palaeography and translation, as well as identifying contexts: thus modern-language students assisted others with short passages in foreign languages in documents for those without the relevant languages, while music, English literature and philosophy students often assisted historians in return for guidance on unfamiliar historiographies. It is through such interactions that a research community is built and the lone-scholar model of humanities research challenged; building what has been called a ‘community of inquiry’ in pedagogical literature for history.¹⁴

The group presentations gave the students the opportunity not only to test the skills they had acquired in a low-stakes assessed exercise but also to apprehend the module tutors’ expectations of the quality of work for the module. They were also able to see and learn from how others did things better (or worse!), whether in contextualising, text analysis, creativity or overall approach – something they could discuss in a short reflective exercise worth half the marks for the group project assessment, in which they offered an account of the successes and failures of their group and their own part in these, often with disarming honesty!

Just before the students selected their individual project, we introduced them to the platform for their digital editions. This was the open-source software Xerte, initially developed at the University of Nottingham¹⁵ to help academics and other educators build viable virtual learning environments without requiring programming or coding skills. It is equally adaptable for the presentation of materials by students. It provides users with a considerable library of webpage templates on which they can mount documents or images and accompany them with hotspots, zoom functions, tables, timelines, film inserts or quizzes. It is thus in effect an entire toolkit for building a suite of webpages with very little prior technical knowledge, but which is not so elaborate as to completely solve every design issue at the click of a button. In places, workarounds sometimes become necessary, and ingenuity may be required. If a student is familiar with coding, they have been able to personalise their project further. Xerte has enabled each student to design, build and implement a suite of webpages to support an edition at the heart of which sits a digital image of an original document or object accompanied by a transcription (and sometimes translation) of the text where appropriate, alongside pages of contextualisation, interpretation, annotation, argument and other apparatus. The content, arrangement, balance and navigation of these pages were part of what was ultimately assessed: for example, was the Xerte object designed to support the user in the way most appropriate to the type of edition the student had opted to produce? Students presented an advanced plan for the webpages in an extended final class, in which the whole group was encouraged to query decisions and offer suggestions for further improvements, before the students worked further on the edition after teaching had ended.

Two further key decisions were taken about the approach to the assessment challenge which both differentiated the task from those for other modules at King’s. First, no word limit was set for the edition. This reflected our view that, depending on what type of edition students wanted to do, very different approaches might be appropriate in terms of the balance of text and image, or between detailed textual commentary/annotation and discursive introduction/contextualisation. Rather than becoming unduly exercised over hitting a target length, we wanted students to think about the amount of effort a project would involve, and then support their decisions once an appropriate scale had been decided upon. This certainly felt risky, and it led on occasion to some quite substantial projects where a student’s enthusiasm had been especially engaged. However, it did not result in students feeling overburdened, and they generally got the point that longer was not necessarily better. With sufficient consultation with the tutors we believe students have been good at setting appropriate goals for themselves, and it has removed one potential source of stress.

One thing that may have facilitated this was our wider approach to assessment criteria. We took the decision that these would not be made available until the halfway point in the module when the students had both been introduced to the techniques involved in producing a good edition and done some work on applying these in their group projects. Moreover, not least as a means of consolidating the learning from this section of the module, a classroom session saw the students themselves review the generic faculty assessment criteria, and then discuss in their groups how these could be ‘translated’ into edition-related specifics, the resulting lists being collected at the end of the class and then consolidated along with any additional criteria the teachers deemed essential into the ‘official’ assessment criteria for the module published on the virtual learning environment. We hoped that this would allow students to take some ownership over the module’s approach, and to internalise the criteria and how they can be applied to the very diverse range of editions that could be attempted. We did not hand over assessment itself to the student body, however, as this would have required knowledge of the historical context for other students’ editions, which would not necessarily have been available to other members of the class. As we noted above, class teaching focused on editorial and research methods and interpretation of results, leaving students to learn individually about the historical context relevant to their document(s); nevertheless, this historical context remained essential for the assessment of the content of the edition and its rigour.¹⁶

During the second half of the module, teaching moved into a workshop model as the students began work on designing and researching their individual projects. During these sessions, as already indicated, the groups formed in the first half of the course provided an immediate support circle for each student, while the tutors moved between groups to offer guidance and establish the needs, if any, of each student for more focused support. In two of these workshops the focus was squarely on academic questions relating to the historical content of the edition, giving students a surgery to which they could bring specific challenges or requests for guidance. In advance of the session, students were asked to compile a short ‘who’s who?’ with short biographies of individuals who would be named in their edition, ensuring that they had commenced any relevant biographical research beforehand, not least in order to highlight persons whose identity remained uncertain. A third workshop focused on the design and presentation of the Xerte object, along with discussion of transcriptions and annotation in digital editions, a session attended by the technology specialist. The final session, in which the students presented their plans, managed to combine a celebratory mood with a last opportunity for students to test out their ideas and raise any nagging doubts they might have before heading off to complete work on their editions.

Outcomes and reflections

After several years of teaching CKG, we judge the module to have achieved or surpassed most of the aims we had in creating it. It has also achieved a degree of recognition for offering a new model for research-led teaching. Presentations about CKG at international conferences on pedagogy have attracted a lot of interest, and in 2020 the module was awarded the Teaching Prize of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

So what would we identify as the successes of this module? First, we have been delighted with the extent to which the module has managed to generate a ‘research community’ encompassing the students in ways that echo the wider community of eighteenth-century researchers. This has been partly within the context of the student cohort itself, where interdisciplinarity has been key. Students enjoyed learning from each other as they acted as ‘subject specialists’ in their various disciplines. During the group projects in particular they learnt to appreciate the different perspectives on a single document of the linguist, literature student, historian and philosopher, and this raised the level of their work. At the same time, we were particularly pleased with the way CKG generated connections between the students and the many academics who have been working on the GPP as fellows. In many cases the students were conducting detailed investigations of particular documents which could be of considerable assistance to academics with limited time in the archive, or without the time to look for references to their research outside the core archives for the theme in question. We were struck by the willingness and indeed enthusiasm with which senior researchers welcomed exchanges with students which might in other circumstances have felt burdensome. One explanation is that such contact took place at a point when the student had built up some intellectual capital of their own in relation to the document; another that such dialogue had been a strong feature of the GPP community more generally, with its workshops and sense of collective endeavour; a third that such contacts had been brokered by the module leads who themselves were part of that community.

Second, the editions have indeed ranged from the most traditional forms of scholarly edition, heavily annotated with careful identifications of events, persons and quotations in the text serving in some cases as the basis for redating or redescribing the document being considered, to public-facing introductions to documents designed to stimulate interest or engagement. Perhaps the most extreme example of the latter was an edition of the Anglo-Portuguese treaty of 1807 presented as a series of online games (involving, for example, transcription or identifying British property on a map of Lisbon) contextualised by a Brazilian mother filmed in Rio de Janeiro explaining Brazilian history to her child. Others have included tracing the subsequent history of diamonds identified in Queen Charlotte’s inventories and presenting a first-hand account of Queen Caroline of Ansbach’s death in the context of an explanation of the nature of her malady, with an actor voicing the testimony to give it greater immediacy (the soundtracks provided for many of the editions have been remarkable, with in one case readings of letters in the original French against a background of specially composed music).

In some cases the opening up of a document has involved extensive work on the part of the student to make it accessible. Two good examples of this involved documents written in archaic German scripts setting a palaeographic and a linguistic challenge. In both cases native German-speaking students were able to concentrate their energies on the former, and even allowed some playfulness, with at one stage of the navigation of one edition a set of options appearing to ask the reader whether they wished to skip a section on the technicalities of decoding the archaic script. One of the editions produced a translation and analysis of a large document detailing the contents of the Hanover Treasury for which the student received assistance from interested scholars in Germany, producing as far as we know the first transcription and translation of this document.

A number of editions have made research discoveries of their own. Several have helped identify the sources on which members of the royal family or court drew in their essays or commonplacing: one student did this for a meticulous edition and analysis of an essay by George III on Iceland; another (a mathematician) for his geometrical notes; another looked at Mary Hamilton’s commonplacing, which revealed Mary Wollstonecraft among her readings. An early example which gave an indication of what was to come was a student who managed to make sense of the curious letter codes Queen Charlotte deployed in her jottings on early French kings as representing the dates of their accession, for which we have so far found no other example from the period. Soon after, another analysed the Prince of Wales’s spending habits in the West End, identifying and mapping the shops he patronised, as well as suggesting that he was not quite as incorrigible a spendthrift as his reputation suggests.

Finally, a number of editions have shown great imagination and exploited the full potential of Xerte in interpreting a document. For example, despite the pandemic conditions, one visiting student used an inventory of George II’s paintings at Kensington both to analyse the artistic traditions represented in his collection and to recreate the hang on a room-by-room basis. The resulting edition and transcription of a seventy-page manuscript went on to win a prize for the best undergraduate research conducted by a student overseas at the student’s home university.

These latter projects have already been of great use to a number of researchers and the project team in their cataloguing of the collection. We hope before too long to mount the results of the best of them on the GPP website, along with many of the high-quality transcriptions the students have produced. This is a terrific testimony to the students and their engagement, and indicates that the idea of involving them actively in the bigger research project has not just been rhetoric, something that is not lost on students who have followed in their footsteps.

The module was a joy to teach, and the tutors learnt much from the students along the way. Student reactions to the module have also been overwhelmingly positive. They show not only that they genuinely felt that they were part of the GPP but also that they identified ways in which it provided opportunities to advance their historical skills which they had not enjoyed elsewhere. Rather than bemoaning the lack of lectures conveying the basic historical information, they often relished being given responsibility for their own research and information retrieval. We have also been delighted that for a number of students it has clearly been a significant factor in shaping their future plans; and even for those for whom this is not the case, they have left the module with a set of webpages which they had built and populated with immense imagination that they could share with potential employers.

To conclude, let us share some of the comments we have received from students who have taken CKG:

This module was easily my favourite … It was very engaging all ten weeks and aroused my interest not only in the Georgian era but generally in research on historical topics … It was really a refreshing module as it is less academic and more of an interactive research based one … The atmosphere of the sessions were always great because of the kind manner of tutors and the active participation that was required from the students.

It has been fantastic to feel part of an international historical project as it develops. I hope we can observe its development further after we finish as I now feel very engaged and invested in it. I have been very excited to feel I am putting my skills as a historian to new use, and it has been fantastic to engage in new methods of carrying out and presenting historical research beyond essay writing. It’s been useful to think about these new ways of offering history to different audiences, and it is definitely something I plan to take further in my career.

It has been a while since I took Court of King George III, but I just wanted to say … I had such a great time in your classes and it really has had a big influence on me. I spent the last few months volunteering for a … Museum [and] had the opportunity to create part of their website. The experience working on a digital edition in your class gave me the confidence to attempt this project. The course also made me realize that it is my passion to work on digital editions and in the digital humanities field. In April I started a MA [and] have chosen to make Digital History the main focus of my degree … I hope to continue gaining experience in this field as I seek to pursue digital edition-related internships in the future. I just wanted to say thank you. It was you … who introduced me to this field in the first place, which I now know that I would love to pursue as a career.

I’m currently in the process of compiling my applications to history PhD programs in the US and I’ve been thinking a lot about how my research with you really impacted my academic career and research interests. Everyone I’ve spoken to about the project, or just the course in general, has been very interested, and I find myself talking about it for very long with anyone who will listen!

I can genuinely say this was one of the most unique and exciting courses I have ever been a part of! I would love to keep receiving updates on the Georgian Papers Programme!

Notes

1. 1  Among others, the Bentham Project, the Clergy of the Church of England Database, the Legacies of British Slavery Encyclopedia of British Slave Ownership, London Lives 1690–1800, the Old Bailey Online and (behind a paywall) Eighteenth-Century Collections Online.

2. 2  Both approaches are embedded within the subject benchmarking document maintained by the UK Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). See the March 2022 iteration at www.qaa.ac.uk/quality-code/subject-benchmark-statements/history (accessed 28 March 2023).

3. 3  For a summary account, see Center for MH in Schools & Student/Learning Supports, ‘Group Work in Education: Addressing Student Concerns’, 2021, https://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/groupwork.pdf (accessed 28 March 2023).

4. 4  The genesis of this module was very much the outcome of the authors’ practical experience in the classroom. In this chapter we make only sparing reference to pedagogical literature in part to underline how little this shaped the module, although many (though not all) features of it align closely with themes prominent in that literature. The specific context of the creation of the opportunity modules allowed us to overcome our frustration with the limitations of other formats for ‘research-led’ teaching by ‘breaking the rules’ of discipline-specific programme regulations. The case was made on the basis of the unique opportunity presented by the GPP, and we were enormously grateful to the external examiners and programme boards more generally who approached the module in such a supportive manner, judging it in terms of results rather than conformity to existing practice.

5. 5  6AAHCF01 in the King’s College London module catalogue.

6. 6  There is a wealth of publications on user experience (UX), but a good starting point is the collection of resources provided by the Neilsen Norman Group, for example Jakob Nielsen, ‘How Users Read on the Web’ (1997), www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web (accessed 28 March 2023). Our thinking about non-linear communication is in part inspired by debates in museology, for example Helen Gaynor, ‘Non-Linear Documentary and Museum Exhibition Design: Interdisciplinary Inspirations’, International Journal of Creative Media Research, 3 (2020); Nina Simon, ‘Museum 2.0: Should Museum Exhibitions Be More Linear? Exploring the Power of the Forced March in Digital and Physical Environments’, Museum 2.0 (9 January 2013), http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2013/01/should-museum-exhibitions-be-more.html (accessed 28 March 2023).

7. 7  For the GPP, see the project website: https://georgianpapers.com (accessed 28 March 2023).

8. 8  Other key members of the team were Julie Crocker, Sarah Davis, Laura Hobbs, Rachel Krier (Royal Archives), James Smithies, Sam Callaghan, Paul Caton (King’s Digital Lab), Angel Luke O’Donnell (King’s College London), Deborah Cornell (William & Mary) and Shawn Holl (Omohundro Institute). The full team is listed on the GPP website: https://georgianpapers.com/about/the-team (accessed 28 March 2023).

9. 9  See the GPP website, in particular the list of fellows (https://georgianpapers.com/get-involved/full_list_fellows), the record of scholarly publications flowing from the fellowships (https://georgianpapers.com/2022/04/26/the-impact-of-the-georgian-papers-programme-on-scholarly-research) and the events page (https://georgianpapers.com/get-involved/events) (all accessed 28 March 2023).

10. 10  This focus on ‘learning by doing’ and developing historical scholarship as a set of skills and practices is grounded in similar concerns to inquiry-based learning, on which there is a substantial literature. For a good introduction see Patrick Blessinger and John M. Carfora (eds), Inquiry-Based Learning for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences: A Conceptual and Practical Resource for Educators. Vol. 2. Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning (Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1108/S2055-364120142 (accessed 28 March 2023).

11. 11  In its first iterations there was also a teaching assistant to help cope with large numbers, Miranda Reading, herself a GPP research fellow.

12. 12  In recent years David Reid Matthews.

13. 13  Georgian Papers Online website: https://gpp.rct.uk/default.aspx (accessed 28 March 2023).

14. 14  See Peter Seixas, ‘The Community of Inquiry as a Basis for Knowledge and Learning: The Case of History’, American Educational Research Journal, 30:2 (June 1993), 305–24; Adrian Jones, ‘Teaching History at University through Communities of Inquiry’, Australian Historical Studies, 42:2 (June 2011), 168–93.

15. 15  We are very grateful to Professor Jamie Wood of the University of Lincoln who first introduced Arthur to the possibilities of this software. For more information, see https://xerte.org.uk; for the range of page templates on offer, see www.nottingham.ac.uk/toolkits/play_8203 (both accessed 28 March 2023). For further discussion of the ways Xerte can assist in achieving assessment objectives, see Maria Kutar, Marie Griffiths and Jamie Wood, ‘Ecstasi Project: Using Technology to Encourage Creativity in the Assessment Process’ (2015), UK Academy for Information Systems Conference Proceedings 2015, http://aisel.aisnet.org/ukais2015/32. Wood’s blog, ‘Making Digital History’ at https://makingdigitalhistory.co.uk (accessed 28 March 2023), platforms several relevant posts.

16. 16  There is of course a considerable literature on student engagement in assessment, but for an example which explicitly engages with such engagement in the context of assessment remaining in the hands of the teachers, see Rosario Hernández, ‘Students’ Engagement in the Development of Criteria to Assess Written Tasks’, REAP International Online Conference on Assessment Design for Learner Responsibility, 29th–31st May, 2007, www.reap.ac.uk/reap/reap07/Portals/2/CSL/t2%20-%20great%20designs%20for%20assessment/students%20deciding%20assessment%20criteria/Students_engagement_in_development_of_assessment_criteria.pdf (accessed 28 March 2023).

References

• Blessinger, Patrick and Carfora, John M. (eds), Inquiry-Based Learning for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences: A Conceptual and Practical Resource for Educators. Vol. 2. Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning (Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2014).
• Center for MH in Schools & Student/Learning Supports, ‘Group Work in Education: Addressing Student Concerns’ (2021), https://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/groupwork.pdf (accessed 28 March 2023).
• Gaynor, Helen, ‘Non-Linear Documentary and Museum Exhibition Design: Interdisciplinary Inspirations’, International Journal of Creative Media Research, 3 (2020).
• Hernández, Rosario, ‘Students’ Engagement in the Development of Criteria to Assess Written Tasks’, REAP International Online Conference on Assessment Design for Learner Responsibility, 29th–31st May, 2007, www.reap.ac.uk/reap/reap07/Portals/2/CSL/t2%20-%20great%20designs%20for%20assessment/students%20deciding%20assessment%20criteria/Students_engagement_in_development_of_assessment_criteria.pdf (accessed 28 March 2023).
• Jones, Adrian, ‘Teaching History at University through Communities of Inquiry’, Australian Historical Studies, 42:2 (June 2011), 168–93.
• Kutar, Maria, Griffiths, Marie and Wood, Jamie, ‘Ecstasi Project: Using Technology to Encourage Creativity in the Assessment Process’, UK Academy for Information Systems Conference Proceedings 2015 (2015), http://aisel.aisnet.org/ukais2015/32.
• Nielsen, Jakob, ‘How Users Read on the Web’ (1997), www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web (accessed 28 March 2023).
• Quality Assurance Agency, ‘History’ (2022), www.qaa.ac.uk/quality-code/subject-benchmark-statements/history (accessed 28 March 2023).
• Seixas, Peter, ‘The Community of Inquiry as a Basis for Knowledge and Learning: The Case of History’, American Educational Research Journal, 30:2 (June 1993), 305–24.
• Simon, Nina, ‘Museum 2.0: Should Museum Exhibitions Be More Linear? Exploring the Power of the Forced March in Digital and Physical Environments’, Museum 2.0 (9 January 2013), http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2013/01/should-museum-exhibitions-be-more.html (accessed 28 March 2023).