JISC

The aim is to use social networking and mobile technologies to foster a sense of community in the Strand area of central London through a technique known as life-writing.

Life-writing is a broad and creative field which explores personal life stories, and how they intersect with accounts of the lives of others. Residents, business owners and employees working in the area will all be visited by researchers from the JISC project, Strandlines Digital Community based at King’s College London.

The researchers will also visit local community centres and events, digitise materials from the King’s archives and interview staff at King’s and launch a website in the autumn to generate contributions.

Ben Showers, programme manager at JISC, said: “We urgently need to engage communities with the research going on in universities and colleges to ensure that we really maximise these publicly funded resources and findings.  But the benefits go both ways - so the training provided by Strandlines and similar projects is helping to create a more technology savvy population who are more confident in contributing to the web.

“While the Strandlines project is engaging a community in the heart of London, the approach it uses will form a valuable model for similar work across the UK,” he concluded.

The project will create an online, interactive resource documenting life and work on the Strand over the past 200 years, through stories, audio and photographs. It will combine material taken from the College’s own archive, Westminster City Archives and elsewhere with people’s own photographs and memories, captured through a grassroots digitisation project.

Professor Clare Brant, project director working at the centre for life-writing research, said: “One aim of the project is to investigate the significance of the Strand in people’s life stories. Life-writing is a little different from oral history: while both value information about the past, life-writing also encourages awareness of literary and creative characteristics in the present, and how these may shape accounts of the past. At the Centre for Life-Writing Research, we look forward to learning about the Strand from others who live and work here; and to helping people explore new ways and new media in which to share their impressions of life on the Strand.”

Download a booklet about crowd sourcing and how it worksLorna Hughes, project manager at the centre for e-research at King’s, said: "Web 2.0 technologies have created new and easy ways of bringing together communities and allowing them to engage with each other. We are excited about the chance to explore how these approaches can make the Strand come alive in the digital world." 

Benn Keaveney, chief executive at Age UK Westminster, said: "The concept of memory, storytelling and making use of new technology being made available for our service users is something we are already investigating, and so we are keen to see what further work could arise out of this local project in the Strand area of Westminster."

The project has been organised by the Centre for Life-Writing Research, the Centre for e-Research, the Department of Geography and the King's College London Archives and will initially run as an 11 month pilot. Partner organisations include the City of Westminster Archives Centre and the charity Age UK Westminster.

For further information, or if you would like to contribute material for the project, please contact Lorna Hughes, email lorna.hughes@kcl.ac.uk or telephone 0207 8482426.

Find out more about the community collections that JISC is running