22 January 2013
Behind the scenes in social sciences
What do social science curators at the British Library get up to? This post looks across the work of the scoial science department to show the range of activities undertaken by our team.
Every month my colleague @BLRobertDavies and I compile a list of recent activity by members of our department. We circulate this to our colleagues at the British Library as a way of keeping our colleagues in touch with the work that we do. It struck me this month that a post about range of activities undertaken here might provide some insight about what it is like to work within the area of social sciences in an institution which isn’t a university, think-tank, charity or research unit (but has strong links with all of these). I hope that this post might offer a view into the varied life of a social science curator and may even be fuel for thought for those hoping to pursue a social science career.
The Social Sciences department at the British Library includes curators from a range of backgrounds across Information Management, teaching and research (and a combination of all of these). There are subject and area-specific curators who work with the British Library’s collections to both manage these collections and improve access to the collections by those who need to use them. For example, last month we launched our Social Welfare Portal which has been developed by our team members who manage our Social Policy and Official Publications materials. It is a great example of how material is curated by Library staff in such a way as to be useful and accessible to audiences both within and outside of academia. Another way material is curated online is through the development of special website collections, for example, one colleague has recently developed a special collection of websites on Slavery in the Caribbean.
Exterior of an Antigua Boiling House, William Clark 1823 (BL Shelfmark: 1796.c.9). From the Library’s ‘Caribbean Views’ gallery
The British Library is unusual in that under the legal deposit act, we receive copies of all materials published in the UK. Yet this doesn’t mean that we don’t still select and acquire materials. For example, materials are selected on a monthly basis to comprise the reference collections which are held on the open shelves in our reading rooms, while publications published overseas and/or which fall outside the legal deposit act, are selected and acquired by curators.
As the home of our national collections, we want to ensure that the collections are well-used and understood by members of the public. To ensure that the collections are accessible our team members offer in-house workshops and seminars with their audiences, develop public events and often contribute to postgraduate study through seminars about our resources and research methodologies. One of our ESRC placement colleagues developed case studies about our collections which are aimed at social science postgraduates to show the range of our collections and how they can be used to enhance research. These are held on the ESRC website.
For school children, the Learning Team develops materials, workshops and teaching aides alongside the curatorial experts. For example, the Sounds Familiar resource and Food Stories were developed with our curators. We also work with colleagues across the Library to develop our major exhibitions. In fact, the May exhibition on Propaganda has been developed by one of our team members.
Much of what we do requires a very good working knowledge of what academic and other researchers need in order to undertake their research. Department members devote time to developing links and relationships with our users. Sometimes this is done through visits and through developing joint events for knowledge exchange (big events during December covered diverse subjects such as ‘Queer’ Families, Impact in Social Sciences, and Welfare Research), sometimes through collaborative research and collection enhancement activity (for example, the Sisterhood and After project) and sometimes through working with membership organisations, participation on external boards and committees and national and international projects. Curators on our team publish books, scholarly articles and blogs and contribute to strategic activity across the higher education sector and beyond.
Sisters! Question Every Aspect of Our Lives, 1975 © See Red Women's Workshop*
It is very stimulating to be able to work alongside such an erudite bunch of people, and while the knowledge held by colleagues can sometimes be daunting it also means that there is never a dull moment at the British Library!
*Via The Women’s Library, London and part of their 2009 exhibition Ms Understood: Women’s Liberation and 1970s Britain
15 January 2013
Digital Methods as Mainstream Methodology
On the 7th December 2012, the Library hosted the second event of the “Digital Methods as Mainstream Methodology” seminar series. This guest blog gives an overview of the event, the speakers and the topics and issues discussed.
The “Digital Methods as Mainstream Methodology" seminar series is funded by the National Centre for Research Methods Networks for Methodological Innovation. The network consists of three seminars that started in June 2012 at the University of Bristol. This network aims to:
- To inspire researchers to deploy relevant, effective, innovative, digital methods, via a series of three open seminars;
- To identify future training needs so that the wider social science community can make use of digital methods;
- To foster networks for sharing of expertise between social scientists from a variety of disciplines and career stages, and computer and information scientists;
- To provide networking and dissemination opportunities and provide a space to share expertise for researchers at all career stages.
The second seminar kicked-off with an introductory welcome speech and an overview of Social Science resources and the UK Web Archive by Peter Webster (Web Archiving Engagement and Liaison manager at The British Library). The seminar had three guest speakers, including Professor of Information Science, Mike Thelwall from the University of Wolverhampton, Professor of New Media, Sue Thomas, from De Montfort University and Dr.Danah Boyd, senior researcher at Microsoft Research/Research Assistant Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University.
Additionally, the event incorporated creative, specialist “Pecha Kucha” (Japanese for “chit chat”), presentations by postgraduate students and early career researchers currently working with digital research methods across a diverse range of subject areas, including the humanities and social sciences. Each presentation contained 10 slides, and forced presenters to concisely present their material in a rapid fashion, forcing them to deliver their talk in around 3 minutes.
The day was rounded off with a discussion session led by Christine Hine. The session reflected on a number of connecting issues that emerged across and between the two events, and across and between specific projects and overarching issues related to contemporary digital methods. These included: the thorny question of ethics and how to juggle authenticity and meaning with privacy and anonymity when working with digital content; working with secondary digital data as opposed to data that is produced (through, say, e-focus groups); and the difficulties of keeping up with the pace of change, particularly when it comes to dissemination. One thought provoking and challenging suggestion was for digital methods networks to initiate their own inter-and-multi-disciplinary open-access journals! A closing remark by one of the participants reflected on both the powerful opportunities and the powerful responsibilities involved in inhabiting a searchable world.
It was an exciting and informative day for all. More information about the seminars can be found at: http://digitalmethodsnmi.com/
10 January 2013
Research participation and auto/biography
Sarah Evans writes about a visit to the MRC National Survey of Health and Development and asks about the experiences of those who have taken part.
Earlier this week I was lucky enough to spend a bit of time at the home of the MRC National Survey of Health and Development, at the MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing on a delightful Bloomsbury street. The NSHD has followed a representative sample of over 5,000 men and women who were born in England, Scotland or Wales during March 1946. It is therefore the oldest of the British birth cohort studies.
The study started as a maternity survey of over 13,000 babies, collecting information about the costs of care in pregnancy and childbirth. Detailed information about the health of the baby at birth was collected alongside socio-economic data about family circumstances. Over 5,000 of children were then followed across their life with quantitative and qualitative information about health, family and social factors collected at various intervals. One of the fascinating characteristics of the survey is the wonderfully varied platter of data collected. It ranges from great detail about physical characteristics and medical history, to observations of temperament and behaviours (from nose picking to fears and anxieties), to educational reports and hopes for the future from childhood to adulthood. It therefore offers not only an incredibly rich resource for social and medical researchers, but for the individuals involved, it provides a rather unusual form of biography.
Seeing some of the original questionnaires and reading the beautiful handwriting of one of the participants (who, at one point during his childhood, wrote that he hoped to become a musician) made me wonder about the experience of being a participant in such a long-term study (and also: did he become a musician?). The overwhelming majority of the participants are anonymous and will always remain so, but one, the journalist David Ward, has written about his experience of having his life documented by others. At various points he has revisited the data collected about him, to read what teachers and health visitors observed about him as a child, and to find out curious nuggets of information about his habits and home-life. David’s articles (written in 1977 and 2008) show how strange, unnerving and enlightening it must be to see things written down about oneself that one wouldn’t necessarily remember. His experience as a participant raises questions about how well we know ourselves; about the im/possibilities of autobiography; about how memories and selfhood are constructed and; about our reliance on others in producing the narrative of our lives. I left the LHA thinking about all those people (now in their mid-60s) who have taken part and who have enabled researchers not just to answer important questions about health and development, but whose very participation contributes to fundamental philosophical questions about the self. I would love to go back to see more.
Suggested further reading
Cosslett, T., Summerfield, P. & Lury. C. (2000) Feminism and Autobiography: texts, theories, methods. Routledge: London. British Library Shelfmark: General Reference Collection YC.2001.a.11541
Elliot. A. (2001) Concepts of the Self. Polity Press: Cambridge. British Library Shelfmarks: Document Supply m02/21729; General Reference Collection YC.2002.a.7937
Evans. M. (1999) Missing Persons: the impossibility of auto/biography. Routledge: London. British Library Shelfmark: Document Supply 99/1439
Parsons, S. (2010). Understanding Participation: Being part of the 1958 National Child Development Study from birth to age 50. CLS Working Paper 2010/5. London: Centre for Longitudinal Studies.
Other useful information: The National Survey of Health and Development is participating in CLOSER (the Cohorts and Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resource) which will harmonise data across a number of cohort and longitudinal studies and will support cross-cohort research. Find out more on their website and blog.
10 December 2012
Tales from the Archive: How do food researchers from different disciplines use archives
Social scientists conducting food research are increasingly turning to archives to collect data for their studies or in some cases starting their research with a piece of found data from the archives, but what are the rewards, difficulties and methodological questions which arise when conducting ‘fieldwork in the archives’? (Bretell, 1998)
On 19th November the British Library hosted Tales from the Archive. This day-long workshop featured presentations from a range of speakers, all of whom shared their experiences and insights on working with archives to carry out food related research. The talks raised questions about the (re)use of archives by social scientists - how to social scientists engage with historical archives? What are the challenges of using archival material in social science research? How do we distinguish between primary and secondary data? How do we situate the context of an archive in our research?
Polly Russell, Lead Curator in Social Sciences at the British Library, began her talk ‘Archaeology or Social Research? The Biography of an Archive’ by offering a tentative definition of an archive as “a place where material not originally intended for publication is deposited for future use.” This raised the issue of how the data collected by a research project and material held in an archive might differ. While research projects collect data for a known objective, archives are often created for future, unknown researchers. Polly encouraged the exploration of archives by social scientists but with an understanding of an archive’s remit and biography
A display of pears from the 1930s. © Marks and Spencer Archive. Reproduced with kind permission by the Marks and Spencer Archive.
A discussion point which ran throughout the workshop was the difficulty in distinguishing between a a primary and a secondary source. Professor Stephen Mennell’s talk entitled ‘Theory-driven use of archives in food research’ discussed the inadequacies of the traditional distinction between primary and secondary sources as set forth by historians. Professor Mennell also spoke about how his theoretical research led him to the fruitful discovery of the Lord Steward’s papers, in the National Archives, a resource which he considers still to be grossly under-exploited.
Dr Libby Bishop highlighted the rich body of food related data available at the UK Data Service and Helen Wakely, Archivist at the Wellcome Library, reflected on her own discoveries made while ‘Shopping around the archives’ (the title of her talk) which included a collection of recipe cards for some elaborate moulded jellies. Helen also described how archival practice at the Wellcome Library is increasingly moving towards a thematic rather than format driven approach to collecting materials relating to selected subjects such as food, health and nutrition. In her talk ‘On the Strategic Use of Archives in Sociological Research about Food’ Professor Anne Murcott described using Kelly’s business directories to establish the historical existence of ethnic populations and imported food businesses in Cardiff. Like other speakers, she encouraged researchers to first explore existing archival materials before embarking on creating new data sets.
A label from a tin of fruit salad from the 1950s. © Marks and Spencer Archive. Preproduced with kind permission by the Marks and Spencer Archive.
In his talk entitled “‘Sold with a story’: food narratives from farm to fork” Professor Peter Jackson discussed the British Library’s Food: from source to salespoint oral history archive, to which his research project Manufacturing Meaning Along the Food Commodity Chain contributed. Peter raised the question of the different ways social scientists and oral historians view archival material and the tensions between valuing the ‘integrity’ of the whole life while also attempting to make wider arguments about social change.
A discussion with all speakers at the end of the day suggested that ‘Tales from the Archive’ had been a good starting place for discussion about the issues involved in social science food researchers using archives. It was agreed that the many different contexts of use and re-use, as well as the data itself, need to be evaluated in any analysis of archival material and that the ethical issues raised by archival research require further discussion.
By Sue Msallem, British Library Social Science Department
References
Caroline B. Brettell, 1998, "Fieldwork in the Archives: Methods and Sources in Historical Anthropology, pp. 513-546, in Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology, Second Edition. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Useful Links
To find out more about our Food Studies materials and watch a video of Dr Polly Russell talking about our archives which relate to food, visit our pages on the ESRC website here.
19 November 2012
Researching ethnicity, identity and 'mixed-race'
This post discusses our latest Myths and Realities event on ethnicity, identity and 'mixed-race' and points readers in the direction of some relevant British Library collections.
On the evening of 13 November we hosted our latest Myths and Realities event (in partnership with the Academy of Social Science) on 'Our ethnicity and identity - what does it all mean?' Speakers Professor Miri Song and Professor Ann Phoenix spoke about how we think about our ethnic identity, and how the meanings we attach to this identity can change across time, space and social context. The event was chaired by Rania Hafez of Muslim Women in Education.
Ann Phoenix's talk entitled 'Why are ‘race’ and ethnicity crucial to identities and social lives, but not central?' explored how debates about multiculturalism have produced contradictory ways of thinking about 'race', ethnicity and identities. Miri Song's title was 'Does the growth of ‘mixed race’ people signal the declining significance of ‘race’?'. Here she examined what is signalled by the growth in interracial partnerships and of 'mixed' people.
Since the 2001 census, ‘mixed’ has been used as an ethnic category. Indeed, in 2001 the census counted 677,117 who self-identified as 'mixed'. However, as Miri Song notes in her article ‘The creation and interpretation of ‘mixed’ categories in Britain today’ in the online journal Dark Matter, this figure is likely to underestimate the actual number of people in England and Wales whose ethnic heritage is ‘mixed’ because of the different ways of asking questions around ethnicity. Indeed, how we define ethnicity in social research and in wider society is complex and subject to ongoing revision, as Pablo Mateos, Alex Singleton, and Paul Longley discuss in their article about how we analyse ethnicity classifications.
In the Library we hold a range of different resources which relate to the how we understand, measure and interpret ethnicity and ethnic identities. As well as the statistical reports which relate to census data (reports for 1921-1991 are in the Social Science Reading Room on the open shelves), academic journals and monographs (including books by both Miri and Ann – see below), we hold collections which speak to the lived experience of minority ethnic identities in Britain. For example, we have an oral history collection called Moroccan Memories in Britain which explores the experiences of living in Britain by Moroccan migrants. More details about oral history collections which explore ethnicity and identities can be found here.
In our Social Science Reading Room we have copies of recently published academic books which relate to the study of ethnicity, ‘race’ and identity both in theoretical terms and with relation to social policy. On the open shelves you will also find editions from the last 12 months of relevant journals.
More historical collections include The India Office collections which are particularly valuable for those seeking to research the complex relationship between Britain and India, including the migration and settlement of Indians in Britain as well as British in India.
So, whether you are taking an historical, quantitative or qualitative approach to researching ethnicity and identity, our collections should be a good place to start.
Useful references and linksPhoenix, Ann. & Tizard, Barbara. Black, white or mixed race? Race and racism in the lives of young people of mixed parentage. London : Routledge, 2001.
British Library Shelfmarks
Document Supply m01/42623
General Reference Collection YC.2002.a.2257
Song, Miri. Choosing ethnic identity. Cambridge : Polity, 2003.
British Library Shelfmarks:
Document Supply m03/15838
General Reference Collection YC.2007.a.296
Pablo Mateos, Alex Singleton, and Paul Longley (2009) 'Uncertainty in the analysis of ethnicity classifications: some issues of extent and aggregation of ethnic groups.' Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies: 35 (9) Draft 'in press' version.
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