Our free online course, Propaganda and Ideology in Everyday Life starts next Monday, 12th June.

Learners have already started introducing themselves on the welcome page for the course. So far, we've had comments from learners in Ukraine, Germany and Costa Rica, as well as from the UK, USA and Canada. Our group of learners includes students, teachers, journalists and others working in fields such as Human Rights and Communications and Marketing. Political views and past experience vary - a common link is an interest in understanding more about communication and current affairs, and the ways in which values are influenced and formed.

The course has been developed by the British Library, in partnership with the Centre for the Study of Political Ideologies at the University of Nottingham and hosted by FutureLearn. Lead Educators are Maiken Umbach, Mat Humphrey, Sascha Auerbach and Ian Cooke.

The course is run as a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), which gives us the opportunity to draw on the experiences of our learners, and this is an important element. The steps in each week give insight to current academic research, from across disciplines in the humanties and social sciences. In addition, learners are asked how the concepts discussed relate to their personal experience and everyday lives - we are interested in the ways that ideologies are expressed and reinforced in situations that we may not normally think of as "political". Each week, we ask learners to share images that they associate with the themes being discussed: freedom, justice, community, nationhood and consumerism. You can see some of those images on our Flikr group.

An important element of the course is that it explores the differences in the political beliefs that we hold, and also highlights areas of common ground; for instance in the value that we place on freedom and on community. Already, learners have started talking about the ways in which people react to news or opinions that challenge their political views. A strength of this course is that it provides a forum in which we can talk critically about important political questions in a group where we don't share the same the political views.

Registration for our course is open now, and you can join at: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/propaganda. Our learners include "avid MOOcers" and those coming to FutureLearn for the first time. No prior knowledge or training is required - just an interest in the way that political ideologies are formed and expressed.

 

Visualisation of links between websites from the UK crawled during 1996, generated by Rainer Simon

On Wednesday 14th June, we'll be discussing the potential of the archived web in understanding contemporary society and politics.

Our event is chaired by Eliane Glaser, author of Get Real: How to see through the Hype, Spin and Lies of Modern Life, and features contributions from Andy Jackson (British Library), Jefferson Bailey (Internet Archive), Jane Winters (University of London) and Valérie Schafer (French National Centre for Scientific Research).

The first web archive, the Internet Archive, began in 1996. Since then, many university and national libraries around the world have started web archiving initiatives. The British Library began in 2004, and, since 2013 has collected an annual snapshot of all UK web sites. As such, there are very rich collections built up around the world that have documented political and social movements both at international and local levels. For example, the Library of Congress has led collections on the Arab Spring, and the UK Web Archive has collections on past General Elections.

As libraries have gained more experience with building collections of the archived web, so researchers and other users of web archives have developed new methodologies and tools for analysing the collections. As advances are made, so new challenges arise and are identified. The web itself is changing, with one of the biggest challenges for archiving being the use of social media - generating huge amounts of data, but often being highly time dependent and reliant on specific software and hardware to interpret.

As with any large and complex collection, context remains an important consideration. Web archive collections are informed by curatorial or academic judgement on what might be the most significant websites, and may not reflect the most popular sites at a time. When it comes to reporting current events, social media and the web can be portrayed as more "democratic" and open to wider participation than more traditional news media. However, communication on the web includes rumour, satire and misdirection, alongside eyewitness reports and a whole range of data sources and types. Technology to archive the web lags behind the technology to create web sites, so some elements of a web page may be missed by web archiving tools. Additionally, web archiving at a national level often takes place within a legal framework that restricts collecting within national borders. The omissions of web archives can be a useful and interesting source for understanding the structure of web, but, as with other forms of analysis, researchers need information on what decisions were made, and under what conditions, a collection was made.

These are some of the issues that we'll be discussing on 14th June. We'd love you to join us and contribute to the debate. More details and booking can be found on our Whats On pages.  

Our panel discussion forms part of the Digital Conversations series and also connects to a week of conferences, hackathons and other events in London that talk about recent advances in web archiving and research on the archived web.You can follow discussions from the conferences on Twitter, using our hashtag #WAweek2017

 

  

Polly Russell, Lead Curator for Politics and Public Life, reports on our event to mark International Women's Day 2017: 'Rebels in the Archives'.

Earlier this month, to mark International Women’s Day, the British Library hosted ‘Rebels in the Archives’, a sell-out panel discussion with four women who, in different ways, have uncovered the hidden histories of women’s lives in Britain’s past.

The evening kicked off with Heidi Safia Mirza, Professor of Race, Faith and Culture at Goldsmith’s College and author of Young Female and Black. Heidi discussed how Women of Colour have been rendered invisible by the absences and omissions which characterise most representations of the past. Attend to the archive, look beyond the obvious and take responsibility for finding and accounting for Women of Colour when researching women’s lives was her message.

Next up was Abi Morgan, BAFTA and Emmy Award winning writer and producer whose film Suffragette introduced cinema audiences around the world to the story of how working class women fought to get the vote in the UK. Abi described the process of writing the film’s script, how libraries and archives held the key to the narrative and character and of the totemic importance of archival objects – she described the tiny purse Emily Wilding Davison was holding when she fatefully stepped in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby on the 4^th June 1913 and how this brought to life the fragility and courage of ‘extraordinary sacrifice made by the ordinary’.

 

From left to right the 'Rebels in the Archives' Panel: Heidi Mirza; Abi Morgan; Margaretta Jolly; Debi Withers; Jill Liddington. Image courtesy of Polly Russell.

Writer and historian Jill Liddington followed Abi and heroically compressed a life’s work into a splendid 15 minute presentation. Jill, the author of a seminal account of northern working-class women’s contribution to the Suffragist movement, One Hand Tied Behind Us, detailed how archives and libraries held the key to a history of women which had previously been omitted from historical record.

The final speaker of the evening, curator, researcher and digital expert Debi Withers, brought us bang up to date with a discussion of how digital archives and catalogues have the potential, if opened up to tagging and searching, to widen access to and enable links between feminist archives.

The evening’s discussions were expertly chaired by Margaretta Jolly, Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex and someone directly responsible for increasing the number of women rebels in the British Library archives – Margaretta contributed 60 Women’s Liberation Movement oral histories to the British Library as part of the Sisterhood & After project she led in 2013.

After audience questions Margaretta concluded the evening by noting that though the panel employed diverse approaches to understanding the past, worked across different formats and spoke to different audiences, their work was evidence that archives and libraries are places where the rebels of the past could b e uncovered so th at rebels of the future may thrive.

You can see a short video of the evening’s highlights and a podcast of the evening is also available on the British Library's SoundCloud channel.

The event was developed in association with the University of Sussex and was supported by the Living Knowledge Network.

By Rachel Tavernor, PhD Researcher, University of Sussex.

On 21 January 2017, millions of people across the world marched for gender, racial and economic equality. The recent Women’s Marches are the latest chapter in a long fight against misogyny and national and international patriarchy. The heritage of these struggles was echoed by the campaigners who dressed as suffragettes, and carried placards that reminded us that these struggles have been fought before:

“I will not go quietly back to the 1950s!”

“My arms are tired from holding this sign since the 1970s”

Women's March on London, 2017.

Recent events have brought the inequality women experience on a daily basis to the fore. Whilst reflecting on, and reacting to these political changes, I was completing a PhD Placement at the British Library which included researching stories of the suffragette movement. For me, the resistances, rebels and revolutions archived in the Library’s collections became a source of hope. At a time of political uncertainty, my time spent reading suffragette letters, news reports and protest ephemera, were a reminder to me that histories are made by both politicians and protests.

Suffragette Struggles

Suffragettes, like many campaigners, marched to demonstrate the strength of their movement and to pressure the government for political action. The demonstrations were also used as a space to mobilise the public. Many marched with striking and bold banners to communicate their campaign. In June 1908, some 40,000 women marched in London to pressure Herbert Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister, to support the women’s suffrage bills in parliament. However, Asquith maintained an aggressive anti-suffragist position. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) retaliated by adopting “more violent, law-breaking deeds” (Purvis 2016). In the following years, the suffragettes’ militant approach was met with police brutality and frequent arrests were made. Yet, the women were not treated as political prisoners, which ensured better conditions and would have acknowledged that their acts were political, but as ordinary criminals. Incarcerated suffragettes surreptitiously produced letters detailing their lives on toilet tissue. In the British Library collections, you can read some of the letters that have been preserved (2 files).

In 1909, imprisoned Marion Dunlop, a member of the WSPU, began a hunger strike with the motto ‘Release or Death’. Several days into her hunger strike, Dunlop was released from prison, as authorities feared that she may die and become a martyr. Many suffragettes went on hunger strike. However, authorities soon decided that imprisoned suffragettes, when necessary, would now be force fed. This was a practice that was previously only used on clinically insane patients in asylums (Williams 2008). Suffragettes’ communicated their accounts of force feeding to the public, which shamed the government. 

“The pain was so horrible I felt as if my nose was being pulled off, and I struggled violently”

Quoted from an account of force feeding (The Suffragette 1913)

On 25 April 1913, the authorities stopped force feeding and introduced the Prisoner’s Temporary Discharge of Ill Health Act (commonly known as the Cat and Mouse Act). Once suffragettes reached a level of extreme weakness, they were released from prison, watched by authorities and re-arrested as soon as they had recovered from their hunger strike. The authorities positioned themselves as the watchful cat that was ready to pounce on the suffragette mouse.

Pussycat Power

Poster, Made by the Women’s Social and Political Union (1914)

In posters, produced by the WSPU, the Cat and Mouse Act (1913) was used to further the suffragettes fight for equality. The poster represented the male Liberal government as a savage cat, which the public needed to ‘keep out’. Suffragettes represented themselves as vulnerable women at the mouth of an aggressive and abusive government. The posters were popular and “[p]art of the reason for the lasting power and fame of the image may be the ways it overturns long-established associations between women and cats” (Amato 2015: 102).

 

Anti-Suffragette Postcards (circa 1908)

Palczewski, Catherine H. Postcard Archive. University of Northern Iowa. Cedar Falls, IA.

Prior to the Cat and Mouse Act (1913), postcard publishers that opposed gender equality, represented suffragettes as irrational cats. The gendered representation of cats, and their association to the domestic sphere, was used to “portray suffragettes as silly, infantile, incompetent, and ill-suited to political engagement” (Wrenn 2013). The relative cheapness of the postcard, and the humour used, ensured that the images widely circulated (similar to internet memes).

Humour was also used by the suffragettes to subvert gendered prejudices. Suffragette Annie Kenney recalls that they were taught “always to get the best of a joke, and to join in the laughter with the audience even if the joke was against us” (in Cowman 2007: 278). Campaigners’ ability to deploy humour, to subvert messages and to undermine politicians are tactics that are still used today.

Top: Dale Cruse, January 21, 2017, Women’s March San Francisco, Creative Commons 2.0

Bottom: January 21, 2017, Women’s March London

The placards, hats and costumes produced for the Women’s Marches show how people can creatively fight prejudices. Like the suffragettes, pussycats prominently featured in the visual representations of the campaign, in response to comments that Donald Trump made about women. Campaigners crafted ‘pussyhats’ and placards to fight back against this dehumanising and sexually oppressive view of women.

Archiving Activism

Unlike large NGO organised demonstrations that distribute branded placards, the Women’s Marches represented a range of grassroots protest voices. In the UK, the Bishopsgate Institute recognised the importance of archiving these placards: “people took to the streets to highlight the particular issues they were passionate about… In years to come, the placards and messages from this March will be essential in understanding the concerns of large sections of the UK population at the beginning of 2017” (Dickers 2017). Not only are the subjects of the placards of interest but also how they are made. The time campaigners spent knitting hats, painting signs and sewing costumes, contribute to understanding the craft of the protest.

The Women’s Marches across the world were primarily organised and promoted online. They were also documented on websites and social networks: on Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and blogs. The way in which activism is organised, and represented, further contribute to understanding the politics and practices of a movement. Civil rights campaigner Angela Davis, in her Women’s March speech in Washington, said “history cannot be deleted like web pages” (Davis 2017). Davis’ speech was a call for people, as agents of history, to resist the Trump administration. For me, it was also a reminder that the preservation of our protests are also vulnerable.

Webpages are constantly changing and can be deleted but they can also be preserved in archives. Since 2013, the British Library archive the entire UK domain every year (websites that end with .uk), which can be accessed via the reading room computers at the Library. The Library also has permission, under the terms of the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations (2013), to archive websites published in the UK (which do not end with ‘.uk’, for example, the Women’s March on London website). However, this is a manual process and the UK Web Archive invite YOU to nominate websites that are published in the UK but are not part of the UK domain. In doing so, you can contribute to preserving the webpages that document stories of sisterhood, struggle and solidarity, in the hope that these archives will inspire people who could be part of the next chapter of the movement.

International Women’s Day 2017

On 8 March 2017, the British Library is hosting a conversation on the power and potential of archiving feminist movements with Jill Liddington, Abi Morgan, Heidi Safia Mirza and Deborah Withers. Margaretta Jolly, project director of Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the Women’s Liberation Movement, will chair this panel of influential feminists as they debate questions of politics, representation and preservation.

The Living Knowledge Network are hosting live-streams of this event at libraries in Middlesbrough and Exeter.

Rebels in the Archives is part of a series of events to celebrate International Women’s Day.

 

Image: Joan Bakewell  © Sukey Parnell

Chris Beckett, Cataloguer in Contemporary Literary Archives at the British Library, writes:

Joan Bakewell’s autobiography, The Centre of the Bed (2003), begins in a white room – a room as white as ‘a fresh sheet of paper’ – at the top of the house in which she has lived for many years. Boxes and packets of papers long-forgotten have been retrieved from cupboards and shelves. They hold evidence of the past, prompts for the play of memory. Can memory sew the fragments together, make good the gaps in the physical record? But Bakewell is conscious that memory is a construction of the present – a reverie of now – that that can deceive as well as illuminate:

‘Stacks of little diaries, a scattering of entries, a few oblique clues. School reports, a clutch of Cambridge bric-a-brac, invitations to sherry parties, a few enigmatic letters – who was Jonathan, who was Ben? And some from people I still know – Karl, Peter, Freddie. Serious boxes house the weightier matters – though just as transient – of a career in journalism and television.’

Those same boxes – the Cambridge ephemera and the ‘weightier matters’ (‘just as transient’) – have now made their way to the British Library, and their contents will soon be available to readers in another room, the Manuscripts Reading Room. ‘Karl’ is Karl Miller, ‘Peter’ is Sir Peter Hall, and ‘Freddie’ is Frederic Raphael (‘with whom I played tennis on long sunny, Cambridge afternoons’), three university contemporaries among many who quickly rose to become, like Bakewell herself, familiar figures in the British cultural landscape.

Joan Bakewell has been an enduring presence on British television for some fifty years, from the trail-blazing topical discussion programme ‘Late Night Line-Up’ (BBC2, 1964-72), which tumbled through the 1960s embracing the excitement and the risks of live transmission, to the retrospective and reflective interviews in ‘My Generation’ (BBC2, 2000).

Her television break began in a predictable place, in the limited daytime slots scheduled for housewives in the early 1960s, in programmes like ‘Table Talk’ and ‘Home at Four Thirty’. However, the conversation was not always about housework and babies: ‘one afternoon it fell to me to interview an eager young doctor with a shock of unruly black hair [….] In three minutes on air he outlined his theory that a dysfunctional family might be a prime cause of schizophrenia.’ The young doctor was R. D. Laing, author of The Divided Self. In the autumn of 1964, two evening appearances as chair of the BBC2 discussion programme ‘The Second Sex’ provided Bakewell with a further opportunity to demonstrate her range, and presaged an invitation to join the (otherwise all-male) ‘Late Night Line-Up’ team.

Since most of ‘Late Night Line-Up’ was transmitted live, few recordings have survived. Occasionally, items were pre-recorded, but even those have generally not been saved. In January 1969, Bakewell and camera crew spent a week in Lausanne, filming a series of interviews with Georges Simenon. Although the programme is lost, we have, in some small compensation, Bakewell’s Simenon notepads which provide a glimpse of the (fastidious and orderly) author of ‘Maigret’ at his Swiss home.

 

Image above: Red note book cover

Image above: Simenon notes, reproduced with the kind permission of Joan Bakewell.

At Cambridge (1951-54), Joan Rowlands, as she was then called, was heavily involved in the theatrical productions of the Cambridge Mummers. The archive includes posters, programmes and photographs from several plays, including (1952) The Importance of Being Earnest, in which Miss Rowlands played Cecily Cardew.

It was at Cambridge that Joan Rowlands met her first husband, Michael Bakewell, who preceded her at the BBC, quickly establishing himself a highly-regarded radio and television drama producer, champion of the new theatre of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, John Hopkins and David Mercer. Although acting was not to be Bakewell’s profession, certainly the art of performance – and the construction of a robust public persona – have been integral to her remarkable television career.

Bakewell’s autobiography is keyed to a larger narrative, to events and trends in the social and cultural history of her time. Her diaries include a number of yellow ‘post-it’ notes, marking where her memory has been prompted. The pocket diary for 1960, for example, includes the following highlighted entries: 18 April (Aldermaston Protest, Trafalgar Square); 27 April (Arts Theatre, Pinter, The Caretaker); 28 June (Wesker, Roots); 1 August (opening in Stratford of Michael Bakewell's production of Faustus).

Image: Aldermaston diary entry

Bakewell later recalled: ‘The Easter I was pregnant with Harriet we joined the Aldermaston marchers as they came into Trafalgar Square. Our near neighbour, the American poet W. S. Merwin, had walked all the way. His plimsolls were frayed and his feet blistered, but his wife, Dido, offered us supper that night with another young couple who’d recently moved into the area, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.’

In recent years, Bakewell has taken to writing fiction as another way of re-imagining the past, weaving new narratives from her archive. All the Nice Girls (2009) takes it cue from a World War II initiative (unimaginable today) that encouraged schools to ‘adopt’ a merchant navy ship and their pupils to exchange letters with sailors, raising pupil awareness and sailor morale. The Ship Adoption Scheme, as it was known, is recorded in the magazines of Stockport High School for Girls, which played an active part; there is a set of school magazines in Bakewell’s papers (again with ‘post-it’ notes attached). All the Nice Girls is – like the novel that followed, She’s Leaving Home (2011) – a story of love and changing sexual mores. CND marches feature in She’s Leaving Home, and so does the vividly remembered detail of Bill Merwin’s frayed plimsolls. A potent emblem from the past that has clearly lodged in Bakewell’s memory, the worn shoes make an anonymous but recognizable reappearance in a brief snatch of dialogue (p. 130): ‘I saw one bloke whose plimsolls had shredded by the time we got to Trafalgar Square’.

The comprehensive archive of Joan Bakewell at the British Library testifies to a pioneering career in television journalism and records a remarkable personal and professional journey, from pre-war Stockport to the post-millennial corridors of the House of Lords.

Rachel Tavernor is a Media and Cultural Studies PhD Researcher at the University of Sussex. In this post, she discusses her PhD Placement at the British Library.

At the start of 2016, I did not imagine that I would be finishing the year at the British Library. For the last three months, I have been based in their Research Development team, as part of their new PhD Placement Programme.

My placement focused on exploring twentieth and twenty-first century anti-poverty activism in the British Library Collections. After a preliminary mapping of the archives, and discovering how much material was available, I narrowed the focus of my placement to housing activism. Struggles for decent and affordable housing, with secure and fair tenancies, are at the forefront of many anti-poverty movements and are often led by women. I developed two strands of the project to explore the ways in which radical, feminist, and at times illegal, protest actions are archived.

Firstly, I traced housing activism, including rent strikes, squats and housing cooperatives, across the British Library Collections. Working with diverse materials, including oral histories, manuscripts, music and news media, I was able to map the differing voices in the archive. In particular, investigating the tensions between protesters, mainstream media and government narratives. A guide to the materials found in the collections will be available on a new project website, Archiving Activism (launching in Spring 2017), which will include images of relevant collection items.

Secondly, I developed a small research project on the practices of archiving activism. To understand and propose ways to archive activism, I conducted a series of nine interviews. Many very enjoyable hours were spent listening to campaigners, feminist archivists and academics who engage with archives of activism. The interviews informed an internal report that I produced for the British Library on potential ways to archive contemporary activism.

 
  Image: The gates of the British Library.   

We will be discussing archives, activism and feminism movements on 8 March 2017 with a panel discussion on Rebels in the Archives. One of the privileges of working with the Library was the opportunity to invite inspiring feminists, Jill Liddington, Abi Morgan, Heidi Safia Mirza and Deborah Withers, to contribute to this event (booking now open).

I recently presented my research project to PhD students at the annual CHASE conference, Encounters, and to British Library staff as part of the British Library Bitesize Talk Series. Both events gave me the opportunity to share my research and reflect on my time at the British Library. For those of you considering applying for a PhD Placement in 2017, here are my reasons for taking part:

• Research Skills: you get a chance to use the skills that you’ve learnt conducting your PhD research in a new environment. You will also learn new research skills by working on a short-term project with industry outputs.
• Rich Resources: you get the time to explore the rich resources of the British Library Collections. You also get to find out about the resources that are yet to be made public or are soon to be acquired… watch this space for some exciting new acquisitions.
• Public Engagement: you get to engage people with your research and the British Library Collections. You may have the opportunity to create your own event, possibly presenting your research or supporting the Library with their large events programme.
• Colleagues and Collaborators: you get to work with some fantastic colleagues who are passionate about the British Library and research. You also get to be part of a cohort of PhD Placement researchers and learn about a wide range of research that is conducted at the Library.
• Inspiration: finally, the British Library is packed with inspiring people, both past and present. I return to my PhD research this week with new ideas, skills and experiences.

The British Library have just published a new call for applicants for 2017/2018 British Library PhD Placements. Included in the programme are placements on:

1. Independent, DIY, and Activist BAME Publishing, in Print and Online, in 21st century Britain
2. 21st Century British Comics
3. Researching the EU Referendum Through Leaflet and Web Archive Collections

If you have any questions about the placements, contact [email protected]

Rachel Tavernor, a British Library PhD Placement Researcher, writes about an upcoming event ‘Rebels in the Archives’ that will be held at the British Library in 2017.

On 8 March 2017, to celebrate International Women’s Day, the British Library will host a panel conversation on the power and potential of archiving feminist movements. Rebels in the Archives is an evening dedicated to stories of sexism, sisterhood and struggle.

Our speakers include Jill Liddington, Abi Morgan, Heidi Safia Mirza and Deborah Withers. Margaretta Jolly, project director of Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the Women’s Liberation Movement, will chair this panel of influential feminists as they debate questions of politics, representation and preservation.

Our panel will be sharing stories of the rebels and rebellion that inspire them. Discussing their own engagement (as historians, screenwriters, researchers and curators) with archives of activism. As well as debating the ways in which collecting, curating and communicating activism can be a radical practice.

Photograph copyright of Theo McInnes and reproduced here with their kind permission.

Jill Liddington is a writer, historian and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. She has researched and written on votes for women since the 1970s, when she first visited the Fawcett Library (now Women’s Library). Her latest book Vanishing for the Vote: Suffrage, Citizenship and The Battle for the Census, tells how suffragette organizations urged women, all still voteless, to boycott the census on 2 April 1911.

Abi Morgan is a BAFTA and Emmy Award winning writer and producer. Abi is the screenwriter of Suffragette, the first ever mainstream film about the British campaign for equal votes. The story focuses on the lives of working class women involved in the movement. Radicalised and turning to violence as the only route to change, they were willing to lose everything in their fight for equality – their jobs, their homes, their children and their lives.

Heidi Safia Mirza is a visiting Professor of Race, Faith and Culture at Goldsmith’s College, University of London and Professor Emerita in Equalities Studies at the UCL Institute of Education. Heidi advises English Heritage on diversity and established the Runnymede Collection at the Black Cultural Archives (BCA), a race-relations archive documenting the late 20th Century civil rights struggle for Multicultural Britain. She is author and editor of several books, including Young Female and Black, Black British Feminism and Black and Postcolonial Feminism in New Times: Researching Educational Inequalities.

Deborah Withers is a writer, curator, researcher and publisher. Their new book Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission: Theory, Practice and Cultural Heritage, asks: what does it mean to say that feminism has cultural heritage? The book explores how digital technologies have enabled impassioned amateurs to make ‘archives’ within the first decade of the 21^st century. In 2010, Deborah founded HammerOn Press, a grassroots publishing label rooted in feminist / queer do it yourself culture. They are also an active trustee of the Feminist Archive South, and have curated two Heritage Lottery Funded exhibitions Sistershow Revisited and Music & Liberation.

Margaretta Jolly is a Reader in Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex. Her current book-in-progress is Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women's Liberation Movement (forthcoming). Her book, In Love and Struggle: Letters and Contemporary Feminism explores feminist relationships as they have been expressed in letters and emails since the 1970s and was awarded the 2009 Feminist and Women's Studies Association Book Prize.

Booking for Rebels in the Archives is now open. We hope you are able to join us and are able to contribute to this discussion.

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English, writes:

So congratulations to Andy Murray on his well-deserved victory at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year (SPOTY) awards, one of countless ceremonies that take place at this time of year as clubs, societies, institutions and industries recognise the outstanding people, events or phenomena of the previous twelve months. In a year dominated by political upheaval it’s perhaps not surprising that linguists at Oxford Dictionaries chose ‘post-truth’ as their Word of the Year 2016 from a list of candidates that included several items reflecting contemporary societal challenges – Brexiteer, glass cliff and alt-right. Here then, in similar spirit, are my ten nominations for the 3^rd unofficial British Library Sports Word of the Year (SWOTY) selected from examples of interesting English usage in the British sporting press and media in 2016:

January (Lawrence Ostlere on Jade Clarke signing for Loughborough Lightning, Guardian Sport): The mid-courter values her time abroad and wants to see more young players experience the ANZ Championship

January (Richard Williams on the treacherous Hahnenkamm downhill slope in Kitzbühel, Guardian Sport): This week’s new snow will enable the skiers to tackle the Streif’s whole length, from its near vertical start to the fiendish icy traverse of the final schuss

March (Eddie Jones on the Welsh RFU’s vacillation regarding Joe Marler’s alleged description of Welsh prop Sampson Lee as ‘gypsy boy’, Radio 5 Live) They don’t know whether they’re Arthur or Martha

May (Robert Kitson on Saracens wing Chris Ashton, Guardian Sport) The player who used to appear several scones short of a tea party has matured and learned from his mistakes

June (Neil Lennon on Wales v Northern Ireland at Euro 2016, Radio 5 Live) The game’s a bit eachy-peachy

June (Barney Ronay on England’s humiliating Euro 2016 defeat to Iceland, Guardian Sport) For the next few months a post-Royxit vacuum beckons

July (Andy Sullivan on how to hit a fade shot, Sky Sports 1) I […] just open my stance up to hit that little lemonade

August (Aaron Bower quoting Gareth Ellis in the build-up to the Challenge Cup Final, Guardian Sport) Last year I was limping around with a pot on [my foot] and now I’m leading Hull out at a cup final

August (Emma John on the women’s Olympic hockey final, Guardian Sport) The first four shuffles had gone begging before the Dutch keeper Joyce Sombroek was ruled to have deliberately fouled Sophie Bray

November (Simon Hughes on the wicket for India v England 2^nd Test): [It’s unlikely to be] a raging Bunsen straightaway

As in previous years the list is drawn from the usual suspects – football and rugby union (two entries each), rugby league, cricket and golf (one each), but this year includes netball, skiing and hockey for the first time. The ten nominations have been chosen as they demonstrate a range of linguistic phenomena from jargon, slang and dialect to loan-words and neologisms. Having spent several years teaching German I’m particularly pleased to include the skiing term schuss [= a straight downhill descent] as a rare example of a sporting loan-word. English dominates sporting discourse for a number of reasons – not just the current status of English as a global language, but also the influential role played by the British in codifying many (but by no means all) international sports. Thus loan-words are relatively rare, but alpine sport, understandably, is a notable exception as illustrated by e.g. piste, après-ski (both from French), langlauf (like schuss, from German), slalom and, of course, the word ski itself (both from Norwegian). Loan-words surface from time to time in other sports – in recent years football has appropriated rabona, tiki-taka and last year’s SWOTY winner, gegenpressing, for instance – but unlike schuss these tend to appear italicised or within speech marks in print, reflecting their novelty or status as exotic, potentially temporary terms. Schuss is an example of sporting jargon – a technical term used by participants, coaches and fans and universally understood within those circles to describe a particular action, skill or element of the sport. The other examples of jargon here are shuffle [= a system used to determine the winner of a drawn contest in hockey in which an attacker has 8 seconds to score a goal in a one-on-one situation against the goalkeeper] and mid-courter [= netballer who specialises in playing centre, wing defence or wing attack]. Thankfully, GB goalkeeper, Maddie Hinch, cemented her reputation this summer as the world’s best at penalty shuffles and anyone familiar with netball (or basketball) will know the value of a versatile mid-courter.

Six entries reveal sporting discourse as a particularly rich repository of vernacular forms. Three items might reasonably be categorised as dialect: eachy-peachy [= phrase equivalent to ‘six of one, half a dozen of the other’]; pot [= plaster cast]; and not know whether one is Arthur or Martha [= to be in a state of confusion]. The other three might be classified as slang: several scones short of a tea party [= slightly, albeit endearingly, mad]; lemonade [= rhyming slang for ‘little fade’, i.e. a golf shot that is directed intentionally left of the target and drifts right in the air before landing]; and Bunsen [= rhyming slang for ‘Bunsen burner: turner’, i.e. a wicket likely to be advantageous to spin bowlers]. Finally, Royxit [= the resignation of former England football manager Roy Hodgson] demonstrates the enthusiasm with which the media latched on to neologisms formed by analogy with Brexit – a blend of <British> and <exit> that quickly established itself as universal shorthand for the UK’s decision to leave the European Union following this June’s referendum. Politics, of course, has always had an impact on language so it will be interesting to see if forms like Brexit prove as prolific as the infinitely productive suffix <-gate> that originated in the Watergate scandal of the 1970s which prompted the resignation of US President Richard Nixon. In July 2016, for instance, Coiffeurgate trended on Twitter following revelations of French President François Hollande’s allegedly extravagant hairdressing bill, and, during television coverage of this summer’s Olympic marathon, Steve Cram urged fellow BBC commentators, Brendan Foster & Paula Radcliffe, to end a long-winded discussion of Bahrainian athlete Alemu Bekele’s frequent stops to tie his shoelaces with the phrase enough of Lacegate. Guardian journalist Sean Ingle’s use of Chexit and Lexit to refer, respectively, to Chelsea’s and Liverpool’s current absence from European football competition demonstrates how such light-hearted wordplay appeals to our sense of linguistic creativity.

Not surprisingly, Brexit merits an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, unlike Royxit, which, as a neologism, is unlikely to meet criteria for inclusion. Many of this year’s candidates are recorded in authoritative reference works, but some have yet to reach the attention of lexicographers, so their presence in the British Library’s newspaper collections, web and sound archives is an invaluable resource for language scholars monitoring the continued evolution of English. The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, includes mid-court and schuss, Collins English Dictionary categorises not know whether one is Arthur or Martha as ‘Australian and New Zealand informal’, while the Dictionary of the Scots Language records eachy-peachy from the 1960s. The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2006 edition) includes several examples of NOUN short of a NOUN (e.g. sandwich short of a picnic) and the BBC Voices survey (2004/5) captured numerous similar variants (e.g. slice short of a loaf and brick short of a load) confirming this is an extremely productive metaphor for mild eccentricity, although neither features scone short of a tea party. I’ve been unable to find the others in print glossaries, although the Cockney Rhyming Slang website suggests Bunsen burner is established rhyming slang, albeit for ‘earner’, i.e. easy/quick profit, not for ‘turner’. Proof of their authenticity, however, can be found in specialist reference works and publications: Martin Williamson’s glossary of cricket terms includes Bunsen in the sense recorded here and a Golf Digest article confirms the use of lemonade in this sense and both forms bear witness to our enduring fascination with, and affection for, rhyming slang. Wikipedia explains the importance of shuffles in hockey, while pot is captured in a recording submitted to the Library’s Evolving English WordBank.

And so to this year’s winner … given the incomprehensible absence of female athletes in this year’s SPOTY top three and comparative lack of representation in the nominations here drawn from women’s sport – a reflection of the glaringly disproportionate prominence of men’s sport in the mainstream media – combined with the presence of glass cliff in the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year nominations I’m going for shuffles in honour of the extraordinary achievement of GB women’s hockey team securing their first Olympic Gold. Fingers crossed for an increased profile for women’s sport and continued success in women’s hockey in 2017 – especially @DUHC1 Women’s 1^st XI and @southgateHC Ladies 2^nd XI.