Project title: 'The snows of yesteryear: narrating extreme weather'
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Wales
Department Name: Centre for Adv. Welsh and Celtic Studies
Abstract
SUMMARY
The Snows of Yesteryear: Narrating Extreme Weather is gathering evidence of the impact of extreme weather in order to document and develop awareness of, and collect a vocabulary for, the ways in which people describe their experiences of climate change by gathering archival data, and personal recollections, of the impact of extreme weather events. The data collected via the project will contribute to a lager piece of work to be developed with climate scientists (especially the Met Office ACRE initiative) who are gathering evidence in order to map the way that extreme weather events are documented and described over time. The project will also bring these these materials together digitally, and communicate them to a wider audience via a performance piece developed and realized by Eddie Ladd. The primary focus for outreach and communication by the Snows of Yesteryear project is currently a blog based at the national Library of Wales.
With additional resourcing, the project team will expand the integration of digital technologies, and make them central to the remainder of the project in order to capture and archive sources as well as disseminate the outputs of the project. Enhanced website functionality and capacity will be central to the communication of archival reconstruction, textual analysis, oral histories, creative visualisations, story-telling and performance by the project research team. A sophisticated project website will provide the nexus for this material.
The additional website functionality to support this will be developed by the Information Technology and Digital Collections staff of the National Library of Wales, and hosted on the Library's high-availability platforms. The web-site will be predicated on an open-source content management system. This will integrate tools for the capture and storage of audio and video in order to gather a record of practice-led outputs, and will also support the uploading of experiences of extreme events in the form of textual, audio and video content. The web-site will become a key node of knowledge dissemination for the project. And, archived by the National Library, it will be sustained as a publically available resource with lasting public impact, embedded in the Library's engagement and outreach activities.
In order to enhance the distributed elements of the project, and to create additional project outputs that will add value to this work, the project team have developed some revisions to the project plan that require additional funding of £19,997.59. These will be carried out throughout the extended project, now finishing May 1st, 2013. These modifications are described in detail in the narrative below
1. Enhancements to the project website.
- Technical development work will enhance the website by integration audio and video capture tools. This will allow the 'digital storytelling" capacity of the website to be enhanced.
- This multimedia enhancement will be augmented by the addition of additional server capacity for the website, to enable archiving of multimedia project outputs created by the project (including the final performance) and project team (including work by Mike Pearson, including the 2008 "Winter" project.
- Embedding of the project website as a project maintained by the National Library of Wales Public Services department, to encourage its continued use as a digital storytelling platform around extreme weather. This will enhance all project outputs (academic and non-academic) and increase dissemination routes through the Library's rich programme of community engagement.
2. Additional project workshops
Two workshops will be organized by the project. These will be additional knowledge exchange activities, extending partnership activities with non-HE collaborators. In order to maximize their effectiveness, they will be led and facilitated by Roger Owen, Department of Film, Media and Television, Aberystwyth University
- A summative capture of the performance development, documenting the decision making and development of the work to ensure its replicability. This will also provide a method for capturing the process of engagement that has enabled creative interpretation of archival source materials and community-based narrative content.
- A community engagement activity, bridging the gap between community, weather and the performance, and expanding the community that is reached by the project to date and ensuring wider impact.
The Snows of Yesteryear: Narrating Extreme Weather is gathering evidence of the impact of extreme weather in order to document and develop awareness of, and collect a vocabulary for, the ways in which people describe their experiences of climate change by gathering archival data, and personal recollections, of the impact of extreme weather events. The data collected via the project will contribute to a lager piece of work to be developed with climate scientists (especially the Met Office ACRE initiative) who are gathering evidence in order to map the way that extreme weather events are documented and described over time. The project will also bring these these materials together digitally, and communicate them to a wider audience via a performance piece developed and realized by Eddie Ladd. The primary focus for outreach and communication by the Snows of Yesteryear project is currently a blog based at the national Library of Wales.
With additional resourcing, the project team will expand the integration of digital technologies, and make them central to the remainder of the project in order to capture and archive sources as well as disseminate the outputs of the project. Enhanced website functionality and capacity will be central to the communication of archival reconstruction, textual analysis, oral histories, creative visualisations, story-telling and performance by the project research team. A sophisticated project website will provide the nexus for this material.
The additional website functionality to support this will be developed by the Information Technology and Digital Collections staff of the National Library of Wales, and hosted on the Library's high-availability platforms. The web-site will be predicated on an open-source content management system. This will integrate tools for the capture and storage of audio and video in order to gather a record of practice-led outputs, and will also support the uploading of experiences of extreme events in the form of textual, audio and video content. The web-site will become a key node of knowledge dissemination for the project. And, archived by the National Library, it will be sustained as a publically available resource with lasting public impact, embedded in the Library's engagement and outreach activities.
In order to enhance the distributed elements of the project, and to create additional project outputs that will add value to this work, the project team have developed some revisions to the project plan that require additional funding of £19,997.59. These will be carried out throughout the extended project, now finishing May 1st, 2013. These modifications are described in detail in the narrative below
1. Enhancements to the project website.
- Technical development work will enhance the website by integration audio and video capture tools. This will allow the 'digital storytelling" capacity of the website to be enhanced.
- This multimedia enhancement will be augmented by the addition of additional server capacity for the website, to enable archiving of multimedia project outputs created by the project (including the final performance) and project team (including work by Mike Pearson, including the 2008 "Winter" project.
- Embedding of the project website as a project maintained by the National Library of Wales Public Services department, to encourage its continued use as a digital storytelling platform around extreme weather. This will enhance all project outputs (academic and non-academic) and increase dissemination routes through the Library's rich programme of community engagement.
2. Additional project workshops
Two workshops will be organized by the project. These will be additional knowledge exchange activities, extending partnership activities with non-HE collaborators. In order to maximize their effectiveness, they will be led and facilitated by Roger Owen, Department of Film, Media and Television, Aberystwyth University
- A summative capture of the performance development, documenting the decision making and development of the work to ensure its replicability. This will also provide a method for capturing the process of engagement that has enabled creative interpretation of archival source materials and community-based narrative content.
- A community engagement activity, bridging the gap between community, weather and the performance, and expanding the community that is reached by the project to date and ensuring wider impact.
Organisations
| Description | This follow-on funding for the Snows of yesteryear project was to extend the digital outputs available, notably making the performance accessible online and to develop the project website into a documentation of the creative process. This has had the effect of making the project a visible archive of the performance, as well as the archival sources that underpinned its development. As a consequence of this visibility, the unique performance that was developed for the Snows of yesteryear has since been performed at the edinburgh festival, and at the National Theatre of Wales, to Critical acclaim. Eddie Ladd, the performer, was also the recipient of a British Council award. The extension funding was also used by our partners in climate science at the Met Office ACRE initiative to develop online videos of the historic weather reconstructions. |
| Exploitation Route | The historic weather research will be useful for longer term reanalyses of climate impact. Furthermore, the PI (Lorna Hughes) is in the process of taking forward further research on how the project (based on co-creation and interdisciplinary) typifies what 'Digital Humanities' really looks like now. This involves reconceptualising the project as an experiment in building and sustaining a complex and hybrid archive of materials related to extreme weather impact in Wales, their analysis through performance and scientific visualization, and the communities that contribute this data. It's the sort of project we will see more and more of as we move towards digital humanities 3.0: not just a collection of sources but a convergence of practices: artistic, scientific, and humanistic, and building connected communities around the content. Documenting this sort of practice over the long term creates all sorts of interesting issues - how do we replicate the relationships between archives, scientific visualization, and performance? How is provenance of archives retained when embedded in a scientific visualization, or a performance? This collaboration of disciplines and data types is an act of curation as much as a piece of scholarship. How will the convergence of digital and born digital be preserved and replicated over the long term? This embedding of print within a multiplicity of media practices and forms of knowledge production is also highlighted in the Digital Humanities Manifesto as an exciting means of determining the interface to information, data, and knowledge. Situating these as information management challenges associated with managing and sustaining complex collections over time is a major step forward in the stewarding and curation of humanities data, and can foster expertise that will be essential to managing born digital material over time. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Creative Economy,Energy,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| URL | http://eira.llgc.org.uk/ |
| Description | The Snows of Yesteryear carried out research in a number of areas: archival exploration of the history of extreme weather in Wales; scientific visualisations of extreme weather impact historically in collaboration with the MET Office ACRE initiative; community engagement around memories of extreme weather, and the use of performance to communicate ideas around memory of resilience and vulnerability (resulting in the project final output, Eddie's Ladd's performance, Dawns Ysbrydion/Ghost Dance). Since the end of the project, the findings have been used: - in public engagement activities by the Met Office around history weather reconstructions - Eddie Ladd's performance has been commissioned by the National Theatre of Wales for a larger audience - the project team have carried out a number of public engagement activities based on the project's findings. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2013 |
| Sector | Creative Economy,Education,Environment,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal |
| Title | Snows of Yesteryear: Digital Outputs |
| Description | Digital Outputs Snows of Yesteryear Website (eira.llgc.org.uk), a bilingual resource that documents the project Contains images of NLW manuscripts of historic weather accounts Community engagement: stories and memories of extreme weather Permanent digital archive of the performance, including - Performance video from three cameras - Performance audio recording - 300 still photographs of rehearsal and performance |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2013 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The material relates to the construction of a narrative of the performance, and documents the creative practice. This enables replication of the concept. |
| URL | http://eira.llgc.org.uk |