Curating Childhoods: Developing a Multimedia Archive of Children's Everyday Lives

Curating Childhoods is a 12-month study that forges links across disciplines in order to transform the way we document and archive children's everyday lives in the digital age. To date, accounts of children's lives have been conspicuously absent from the Mass Observation Archive - in large part due to the ethical challenges of documenting and recording intimate accounts of children and young people's lives. Such a trend stands in stark contrast to increased growth and proliferation of young people's use of online social media platforms as a means of self-documenting and curating multimedia accounts of their lives. In response to these trends, the study facilitates dialogue between young people's private digital data practices and public archives seeking to document the everyday.

The project builds on a previous research initiative called 'Face 2 Face: Tracing the Real and the Mediated in Children's Cultural Worlds' (2012-3) which developed micro ethnographic and multimedia tools for documenting the temporal rhythms of children's everyday lives. The Curating Childhoods study is the next logical and necessary step in the development of this initiative and seeks to explore how researchers and archives can work with children and young people to address the ethical challenges of documenting and curating public records of everyday life. With the increasing democratisation of 'documentation' it has been ever more important to reconsider the role of the researcher, the archivist, and the professional as arbiters of ethical governance and practice. Consequently, the documentation of children and young people's lives will act as a key test case for our ability to work through this terrain, investigating alternatives to the simple privatisation of responsibility for protecting privacy (Hope, 2014).

In collaboration with the Mass Observation Archive, the project's team will develop a series of knowledge exchange activities and resources bringing together the expertise of archivists, researchers and young people around issues of ethics and responsibility in the curation and sharing data. In the first instance, the research team will invite a panel of young people involved in the 'Face 2 Face' study to participate in a day workshop with archivists to talk about their everyday practices of curating, storing and sharing personal data. This workshop will then form a key contribution in the development of a set of new open-access knowledge exchange materials around 'good practice' in the curation and management of private digital data, targeted at young people, archivists and researchers.

A key outcome of the Curating Childhoods project will be the development of a new on-going multimedia dataset on 'Everyday Childhoods', to be hosted and maintained at the Mass Observation Archive. This dataset will provide a rich new resource for researchers that will provide invaluable insights into the changing social and cultural configurations of childhood and youth over time. The dataset will initially comprise data collected as part of the Face 2 Face study, but will also later incorporate new data contributions from a 'self documentary day' for children on 12th May 2015, co-organised by the research and archive teams. Throughout the process of creating and compiling this dataset, the research and archive teams will critically examine the practical and ethical challenges of a establishing a new multimedia dataset on 'Everyday Childhoods' in the Mass Observation Archive. More broadly, this study will seek to contribute to on-going discussions across the arts and humanities and the social sciences on the challenges of recording and preserving digital and multimedia accounts of the everyday, as well as the wider ethical implications of researching and documenting children's lives in the digital age.

Curating Childhoods involves a partnership between the interdisciplinary Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY) at the University of Sussex and the Mass Observation Archive. The project builds on more than two years of sustained work within CIRCY on the theme of Digital Childhoods including successful public engagement (the Space Invaders competition), interdisciplinary methodological innovation (New Frontiers in QLR) and the development of a new multimedia data set on children's everyday lives within a digital landscape (Face 2 Face).The commitment from the Mass Observation Archive to work collaboratively to establish a public archive on everyday childhoods is enormously valuable, assuring a legacy for a growing collection which will enrich and invigorate this national resource and provide a focus for collaboration and development into the future. The project aligns with the University of Sussex's strategic research investment in the area of Digital Humanities.

Knowledge exchange is designed into Curating Childhoods at every stage with key activities conceived as ways of sharing understanding between the relevant stakeholders (young people, parents, researchers, archivists and professionals). Over the course of 12 months, researchers from CIRCY and Mass Observation staff will engage in a number of forms of knowledge exchange, securing the real-world impact of the project. In the first six months these will include:
(a) workshops hosted by within the MO Archive to bring together young people with archivists;
(b) a Brighton Fringe Festival event that allows us to engage with a wider 'public';
(c) child and youth participation in a Mass Observation on May 12th involving a collaboration between MO, CIRCY and East Sussex schools.
The second half of the project will involve distilling and sharing learning from the study through:
(a) using the CIRCY YouTube channel as a platform to share short films on 'data sharing', 'privacy' and 'consent' aimed at audiences including young people;
(b) learning for researchers and archivists to be disseminated through two targeted scholarly journal articles; guidelines on good practice in the form of accessible tips and principles being made available through relevant organisational portals.

The project delivers impact at three levels:

Instrumental impact - The creation and deposit of a new data-set on everyday childhoods will have a direct impact on the MO and the interdisciplinary field of childhood research, encouraging re-use as well as demanding organisational adaption. Learning from the project will be shared with key stakeholders in a range of targeted ways.

Capacity building impact - The proposed project will contribute directly to the capacity of Mass Observation to engage with a number of pressing challenges associated with technological change and the ability to document everyday life in a digital age. In bridging practices of data collection and data sharing/ re-use it will also contribute to the skills and understanding of childhood researchers. Liam Berriman, the Research Fellow on the project, will act as a key intermediary point - combining and synthesising insights developed across the panel of young people, and the archive and research teams. The active participation of young people in the discussion of archiving practice will have an impact on individuals and institutions and will enhance relationships with professionals and educational institutions for all partners.

Conceptual impact - The project will make an impact on intellectual and popular agendas through our interrogation of three linked conceptual binaries- between protection and participation in research ethics, between personal and public archives in data management, and between concrete and abstract audiences/ publics in young people's perceptions of risk and privacy.