The diary of the war is available as a podcast series from https://rss.com/podcasts/lornalloyd/
The Platform to platform (P2P) project ran between February and July 2022. In that time the P2P team met its two main aims. The first was to produce a podcast series based on Lorna Lloyd’s Diary of the war. The second was to use this new audio version of archival content (originally made available as text and images as the LornaL Blipfoto journal between 2019 and 2021) to explore modes of audience engagement with different formats of digitised archive data sets.
In the past year, we have continued our work related to Lorna Lloyd’s war diary and digitised archives in audio format. This has mainly comprised promotion of the podcast series of The diary of the war and the dissemination of the findings of our empirical work. We have achieved this at a range of external events including:
- A showcase event hosted by Creative Informatics (the funders of our work) in Edinburgh on 3rd October 2022 – reviewed here
- Two major conferences, in Chester and then in Bradford, in September 2022 – reviewed here
- An internal research seminar for staff at the British Library on 12th December 2022
Recognition of our work as a runner-up for the 2022 Janette Harley Award at the awards ceremony at Lambeth Palace in London on 10th May 2023 provided another opportunity to speak about our work in public.
Lord Salisbury congratulates Bethany Ray on her performance as Lorna Lloyd in the podcast series of The diary of the war, Lambeth Palace, 10th May 2023
Also in the past twelve months or so, several of the original followers of Lorna Lloyd’s work in the Blipfoto community have contributed to a photographic extension of the P2P project by contributing to a collaborative blipper-sourced online photo album of the locations that Lorna Lloyd mentioned in her war diary. This can be found in the Blipfoto journal LornaLPodcast, starting with the entry that depicts Hadrian’s wall on 13th July 2022 and ending on 9th July 2023 with a collage to represent the final four locations of the challenge: Durrës; Hanko; Heligoland; and Thermopylae.
Interspersed between the location photos posted in the past year to the LornaLPodcast Blipfoto journal are pictures that provide news updates on the P2P project and the team. Amongst these is a lovely shot of three new graduates – Andras Peter, Michael Suttie and David Graham – all of whom worked on the production of the podcast series in 2022.
New graduates Andras Peter, Michael Suttie and David Graham with Professor Hazel Hall, July 7th 2023
Four members of the P2P team – myself, Dr Bruce Ryan, Dr Iain McGregor, and Marianne Wilson – also undertook a sister project to P2P in 2022. Heritage organisations and podcasts: scoping study (HOPSS) was designed to consider the use of podcasts from the perspective of podcast producers based in heritage and cultural organisations such as museums and libraries (as opposed to that of audience members in the general population, as is the case for P2P). A few weeks ago in June, Marianne related the findings of this study in a conference paper presented at the Shaking the archive conference in Edinburgh.
Meanwhile members of the extended Lloyd family have kindly been in touch to provide the team with extra material related to Lorna Lloyd. Amongst these is a series of illustrated short stories in a collection called Twilight tales, and a 350-page manuscript of a novel entitled Hangman to fate written by Lorna Lloyd in the 1930s. (The family member who showed us these treasures is the author known as Lorna Baxter. However, ‘Lorna Baxter’ is not her real name. In the 1970s, she took ‘Lorna’ as part of her nom de plume to honour her mother’s cousin, whose writing she had admired since childhood. Lorna Lloyd’s brother Theo gave permission for her to adopt the first name of his deceased sister.)
The pictures in the slideshow below are found in the manuscript of Twilight tales.
Another member of the Lloyd family, who holds an edition of the Lloyd’s annual, allowed us to photograph this scrap book of family ephemera from 1930 compiled by Lorna Lloyd’s father. Here we discovered ‘new’ family photographs, with several that feature Lorna Lloyd herself. The slideshow below displays the photos that include the sixteen year-old, and another couple of examples of her art work completed in 1930 or earlier.
The next priority of the core P2P team members is to write up their empirical research on audience engagement with archives digitised in different formats. We hope to publish our article in Archives (the journal of the British Records Association).
Longer term, we wonder whether the content of the Diary of the war might be recast in another format such as a play or a novel. We also need to check the literary merit of the unpublished work of Lorna Lloyd now in our possession, notably the full-length novel. In the meantime we will continue to promote the podcast series in a bid for it to have as far a reach as possible.
Hazel Hall 