Openness in Research: The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP)

Virtual Volunteering with Special Collections in the Archives of  British Printing and Publishing

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We are thrilled to announce that the Special Collections and The MERL team have won one of the University of Reading’s 2023 research awards, selected for the ‘Openness in Research’ category. In this blog, Project Archivist, Helena Clarkson describes the project and how involving volunteers has been key to its success.

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The MAPP project is a collaborative digital archive Funded by the AHRC, and we have just recently celebrated our 10-year anniversary! 

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Featuring a small sample of publishing correspondence from our vast collections, we are presently focusing on the business records of The Hogarth Press, an independent publishing business set up by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1917.

The Hogarth Press was progressive; featuring new writers of the day: publishing anti-imperialist authors, LGBTQ authors and authors of colour – bringing to the fore important issues and discussions that are still very much alive and critical today.

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As of March 2022, Dr Nicola Wilson (Professor and a founding academic of  MAPP), Caroline Gould (Principal Archivist), Sheila Fisher (Volunteer Coordinator at The MERL) and myself, Helena Clarkson (Project Archivist) have been working with a team of fantastic volunteers to further contextualise this fascinating period of history.

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Driven by one of the MAPP’s research aims of highlighting historic hidden labour, we very much wanted to ‘practice what we preach’ and therefore aimed to involve volunteers as closely as possible during the co-creation of MAPP as a resource, from the project documentation to providing transcriptions.

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Gamifying the archive and working with our volunteers

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Gamification:”The application of gaming elements in non-gaming contexts”

(Deterding et al 2011)

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Building on work already achieved in the pandemic by the Special Collections and MERL teams, I wanted to see how certain elements of gamification could help archivists and volunteers work together. I also hoped to continue looking at how we can work with certain archival processes in a more equitable way, realising at all points, that the Volunteers or ‘Citizen Archivists’ were contributing to and improving one of our resources whilst also adding to a live research project. Simple progress bars shared the volume of ongoing work and ongoing contributions. We also worked on the understanding that not every record can be transcribed. Above all, we wanted to see our progress as a team and not view it as a competition!

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The volunteers have now delivered over 1000 transcriptions, donating over 600 hours of their time.

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It is a brilliant example of what participatory archives can achieve, and the power of a collective completing more work than a single Project Archivist could accomplish alone. Working remotely can be challenging, so I very much wanted to share progress visually as often as I could.

The project will be drawing to a close at the end of June and we will be celebrating the project with a road trip to Charleston House, which one volunteer became aware of during his transcription work:

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“One of the most interesting things for me (about transcribing) is the stories that each of the folders has shown me.  For example, the first letter I transcribed was from Leonard Woolf to J. M Keynes, in which he asks him if he will be motoring to Charleston, which I have now discovered was the modernist home of artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant….”

 – Derek Goodridge (volunteer)

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Marking Milestones

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We have marked many milestones together in the year (and a bit) that we have been collaborating. First, by celebrating our first 100 archive items by hosting a small in-person garden party where I baked 100 biscuits!

Copyright restrictions mean that I am unable to share images on social media, so showing how much work, visually, and providing feedback to the volunteers was so important. Sheila Fisher and I also implemented a buddy system so some transcribers could work together if they wished.

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It is very exciting to have this chance to recognise our hardworking and engaged volunteers.

It therefore seems apt to share the words of Saniya Mehmood one of our past volunteers on MAPP:

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“I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the experience of transcribing documents for the project. Most of all, the fact that it has been remote, meaning that I could transcribe at any time, has meant that I’ve felt really accommodated…This, along with the fact that I find the subject matter to be fascinating – especially being able to learn more about the inner workings of the Hogarth Press and its relationship with its clients and other businesses – has meant that I genuinely enjoyed the work, which actually didn’t really feel like work at all. I really feel like I’ve been able to contribute to academia and, more specifically, the field of 20th-century literature, even if it has been in a small way”.

 – Saniya Mehmood (volunteer)

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Winners!

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The shortlisting decision was made on Tuesday 13th of June, and the winners were announced at an awards ceremony at The University of Reading the same evening. You can read about the final decision here: https://research.reading.ac.uk/engagement-and-impact/volunteers-shed-light-on-modernist-publishing/

The comment featured below from one of the judges has really helped to demonstrate that crediting behind the scenes labour,  has wider impacts than we may first realise:

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MAPP  entered the Research Awards in the hopes to bring greater visibility to the project, and ultimately credit the often hidden work that goes into the building of a resource such as this. We are so thrilled that this award is something we can share with all our collaborators.

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The Modernist Archives Publishing Project is funded by an AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions Grants (2021-4) (following a UoR REFT project award 2019-21) and a Canadian SSHRC Grant (2020-25). For a full list of sponsors and library partners see our Funders and Partners.