JISC

Observing the 1980s brings together, for the first time, 'voices' from both the Mass Observation Collections and the British Library Oral History Collections.  This material offers a unique and inspiring insight into the lives and opinions of British people from all social classes and regions during the 1980s.   

The value of digitising these collections and disseminating them as open educational resources is that currently no established historiography of the 1980s exists.  The decade is largely represented as polarised and the work that does exist is similarly divided into oppositional camps.  By bringing together these resources, students and academics will be able to make and illustrate connections across and between these polarised approaches.  Additionally, a key benefit for educators at all levels is in the raw nature of the information and its potential use across subject areas such as politics, sociology, oral history, cultural and media studies, linguistics, gender studies, narrative and memory studies, migration studies, folklore studies, anthropology and contemporary history. 

We will select between 10 and 20 men and women of different ages, from different social backgrounds who write for Mass Observation, and choose extracts from their writing over the whole decade.  Similarly, we will select interviews from the British Library Oral History Collections to provide complementary audio texts and to ensure a broad coverage of key themes. 

The material will be digitised as a raw open educational resource and deposited at Sussex, in JORUM and potentially via other educational resource sites such as the British Library.  The resource will also be embedded into the University of Sussex VLE (using open Moodle software) and additionally offered on an open ‘guest access’ Moodle site, from the Talis Aspire reading list system at Sussex, using the Labspace facility on the OpenLearn Open University site and through HumBox.  

The project supports institutional goals relating to inspirational teaching and enriching the student experience.  It also increases the accessibility of the Mass Observation and British Library Oral History Collections, and enhances opportunities for innovative collaborative research and project partnerships among the academic community.