Re-archiving the Individual: British Army Officers, 1790-1820
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Leeds
Department Name: School of History
Abstract
This project will explore how we can reconstruct historical lives from archival records on a mass scale. Using a case study of officers in the British Army in the late 18th and early 19th century the project will facilitate a wider exploration of individuals in archives by engaging the archive sector with the process of re-arranging archival collections through digital technologies whilst preserving their integrity in accordance with archival standards. The digitisation of archival records has predominately worked with the confines of the records themselves, for example transcribing names in census or parish record, leaving the user to piece together information across records and time from multiple sources. My fellowship will make a transformational step in digital humanities techniques to move from finding names within records (e.g. by optical character recognition or re-keying sources) to linking records together of individuals. This record-linking process will allow the exploration of individuals as historical actors and their social networks at a scale that is impossible through traditional historical techniques. The project will develop both the technology and the practice to find individuals en masse within archive collections - to 're-archive' records in a way that offers innovative opportunities for researchers, new ways for archives to engage with the collections they hold, and is more user-friendly.
The project's life archive of the British Army officers, created in conjunction with the Sheffield Digital Humanities Institute and The National Archives, will enable the analysis of the 40,000 officers who served between 1790 and 1830. Through this, we will be able to recover the historical experience of the silent majority of Army officers, avoiding the pitfalls of conflating well-known and well-researched individuals with what was typical. This database will be publicly available and enable users to interrogate the data through a series of search and data visualisation tools. These tools will enable analysis of both the whole data set or sub-sets (for understanding groups such as regiments, cohorts, particular ranks or roles) and individuals (for biographical enquires).
The fellowship includes plans for a wide range of publications and dissemination activities, including four conference presentations, two articles, a toolkit and report for the archive sector, three workshops, a launch event for the database, and a conference that includes a wikithon, facilitated research, discussion panels, and training. Following on from the fellowship I will also publish a book on British Army officers.
The project's life archive of the British Army officers, created in conjunction with the Sheffield Digital Humanities Institute and The National Archives, will enable the analysis of the 40,000 officers who served between 1790 and 1830. Through this, we will be able to recover the historical experience of the silent majority of Army officers, avoiding the pitfalls of conflating well-known and well-researched individuals with what was typical. This database will be publicly available and enable users to interrogate the data through a series of search and data visualisation tools. These tools will enable analysis of both the whole data set or sub-sets (for understanding groups such as regiments, cohorts, particular ranks or roles) and individuals (for biographical enquires).
The fellowship includes plans for a wide range of publications and dissemination activities, including four conference presentations, two articles, a toolkit and report for the archive sector, three workshops, a launch event for the database, and a conference that includes a wikithon, facilitated research, discussion panels, and training. Following on from the fellowship I will also publish a book on British Army officers.
| Description | Record Keeping Workshop (TNA, October 2022) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Workshop exploring how records about Army officers were used in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Processes were reconstructed by bringing together material from different archival series held at The UK National Archives (which cannot be done in their reading rooms). The workshop led to a deeper understanding of how records related to each other, and generated questions and discussions about how we can better represent these relationships to potential users. It also highlighted the value of reconstructing the creation and use of archival records to understand and explore collections - a process that emerged from the workshop that we sketched out as 'collection experimental archaeology'. The workshop involved 8 people, and mixed archivists from The UK National Archives (3 people), a curator from The National Army museum, postgraduate students (2), and the project team (2). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |