‘Communities and Crowds’ a participatory work the Science and Media Museum has been developing with local communities in Bradford as part of the Bradford’s National Museum project will be inviting local people to mine the Daily Herald photo collection to explore what is important to them.
‘Using the Daily Herald Photographic Archive as a case study, we will together examine how the benefits of local knowledge, in-person and in-depth material engagement with our collection objects and participatory, face-to-face collaborative working methods can be combined with the breadth and collective intelligence of remote, online citizen research to achieve a common goal. We will do this in order to make previously hidden objects visible, searchable and discoverable, bring to light hidden histories, and tell untold stories within our collection. We hope, in particular, to address questions of inequality in the collection by interrogating together how we might better document, categorise and interpret these photographs.’
‘We will develop a working process where local residents can volunteer to become collection researchers and ‘mine’ the archive according to their own interests, experiences or agendas. Volunteers will take the lead on choosing which parts of the Daily Herald Archive we should digitise and make available to the worldwide online community. They will work with us to define what questions we should be asking about these photographs, what more we should find out about them, and how they should best be documented to capture the knowledge, experience and insight of the people they hold particular significance for. They will work with us to digitise their selected photos and create a citizen science project to flesh out the data, give context to or help answer specific questions.’