Sound, Craft, Vision, Place: Research for Community Heritage

Sound, Craft, Vision, Place will draw together a team of researchers from the arts and humanities to assist the promotion, development and provision of innovative outreach activities to encourage community groups to explore and articulate their heritage for themselves, and to stimulate projects for HLF funding.

The project themes emphasise the importance of oral history, music, art and design, and digital media at the University of Huddersfield, and our ability to draw on expertise beyond the humanities to provide tools that will attract community interest and prompt project ideas. Community groups themselves will be encouraged to specify the kinds of research areas and methods where collaboration or help would be welcomed. We are especially keen to involve those who have encountered barriers to enjoying the heritage, and an important part of our project will be the role to be played by local and virtual communities in the interpretation of their own backgrounds and surroundings, including web- and digital-based activity to encourage virtual volunteering as a communal activity, undertaken both by people who are connected by place and/or by shared experiences and interests.

Among our partners will be the National Coal Mining Museum for England, English Heritage, the Royal Armouries, as well as local community groups, with all of whom we shall be working to develop ideas for projects involving free access to archive materials.

The nature of this project is that it seeks to transfer knowledge and skills from the university to wider society, and the 'impact summary' therefore outlines the project as a whole.

Who will benefit?

The aims of the project in regard to who will benefit are twofold. First we intend to enhance the use of high-quality research by our existing partnerships, such as the Royal Armouries, the National Coal Mining Museum for England, the Thackray Museum and Leeds City Museums. In each case, the intention is to encourage active engagement with research by their staff and users. We also wish to encourage previous smaller partners and user groups gained through projects such as Asian Voices (oral history of the first generation of south Asian immigrants) to further explore how to utilise direct research findings (rather than just data) from existing projects (for example by directing them towards similar projects in other parts of the country).

Secondly, we want to extend the range of public engagement and use of academic research to newer groups by offering an attractive and appealing set of resources, showcased through the open days, roadshows and gateway website. These beneficiaries are likely to be local and regional but by providing templates and toolkits for 'how to find out' we expect links to be made further afield and the benefits to be more widely diffused. Such beneficiaries might include family historians and genealogists, youth groups and schools, local historians, those interested in building conservation, amateur archaeologists, metal detector enthusiasts, church and other faith groups, Beaver, Scout and Explorer groups and so on. A further example is the potential of aerial photography as a catalyst for the exploration of community and personal histories - the role to be played by local and virtual communities in the interpretation and exploitation of these images. We will be encouraging virtual volunteers to explore their own heritage through the photographs, helping identify exactly what is shown in each image, and enhancing the collection by uploading their own stories, reminiscences, film and photography. The web-site is designed to support such virtual volunteering as a communal activity, undertaken both by people who are connected by place and/or by shared experiences and interests.

We will use existing databases of community heritage organisations held by Kirklees Metropolitan Council and others to develop the spread of impact but we also intend, through concerted publicity and active strategy, to draw in new, and hopefully, unexpected community groups. We recognize that some community groups will draw benefits not foreseen or developed by the university.

How will they benefit from the research?

The project seeks to stimulate interest in a wide range of aspects of the past. It will seek to show how university research in history, oral history, design, architecture, archaeology, music and digital media can enrich the public's understanding and develop their access to their own areas of interest. It will not seek to prescribe what aspects of the past have significance but will guide people towards application of rigorously researched knowledge and establish and innovate skills for communicating that knowledge to others. To this end it will draw on other parts of the university, including TV and radio broadcast journalism, and computing (for application of advanced new technologies - to explore the possibilities and to encourage the social networking generation into enagement). It will encourage greater knowledge and understanding of resources in museums and archives leading to greater footfall among all types of user. It will enable a sustained conversation between arts and humanities at the university and community heritage groups for mutual benefit.