Dr Bruce Ryan and I are planning a couple of speaking engagements about our work on Lorna Lloyd and her Diary of the war in the near future, so today we worked on an updated version of our publicity postcard. Above is the front of the version that we are sending to be printed today. If anyone would like a copy when it’s ready, please email me.
‘Podcasting the archive: An evaluation of audience engagement with a narrative non-fiction podcast series’ is now available in issue 2 of volume 28 of Archives, published last month. I am a co-author of the article alongside Dr Bruce Ryan, Marianne Wilson, and Dr Iain McGregor.
In this work we compare audience engagement with a Second World War archive presented digitally in two formats as: (1) images and text in a Blipfoto journal, and (2) sound in an eight-episode podcast series (which starts with episode 1 here). The main findings reveal differences in levels of engagement for each presentation in respect of entertainment value, learning opportunities, and emotional response. Flexibility of access and authenticity of the archived material were also found to be important to audience engagement, with the nature of contextual information provided alongside the core archive key to the latter. Here we further understanding of facets of audience engagement with digitised archives while opening up new thinking on means of encouraging the general public to interact in more meaningful ways with historical records. Continue reading
Last Thursday 18th April, I attended a session at the University of Edinburgh’s Festival of Cultural Heritage Research 2024 entitled Discovery and digitisation: Alice Thornton’s life and books (1626-1707). Continue reading
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 The second was to use this new audio version of archival content (originally made available as text and images as the LornaL Blipfoto journal between 2019 and 2021) to explore modes of audience engagement with different formats of digitised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. Continue reading
Lord Salisbury congratulates Bethany Ray on her performance as Lorna Lloyd in the Diary of the war podcast series.
Last Wednesday I was delighted to travel to Lambeth Palace to attend the 2022 Janette Harley Award ceremony, and to hear the 2023 Maurice Bond Memorial Lecture. Continue reading
The BBC at 100 symposium, organised by Dr Marcus Collins, Reader in Contemporary History and AHRC BBC 100 Fellow at Loughborough University, takes place at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, and online, between 13th and 15th September 2022. A team from the Centre for Social Informatics (CSI), with a colleague from the BBC Archive, is delighted to be presenting at this event. Continue reading
Actor Bethany Ray, pictured here with the original Diary of the war, plays her great-great aunt Lorna Lloyd in the podcast series
After several weeks of preparation, on Tuesday 24th May 2022 we launched the Diary of the war podcast series at Great Malvern Priory. This blog post provides a review of the launch. It also provides links to materials related to this event, and to the wider Platform to platform (P2P) project. (Please scroll to the bottom of the post for the full list of resources.)
The content of the podcast series episodes centres on 25 year old Malvern resident Lorna Lloyd‘s chronicle of the first 16 months of World War II, complemented with contemporaneous news coverage related to the events and issues that she discusses in her writing. A further four ‘bonus’ episodes that comprise a selection of Lloyd’s poetry are included in the series. Continue reading
With colleagues Dr Paul Gooding (University of Glasgow) and Amina Shah (National Library of Scotland), Dr David Brazier of the Centre for Social Informatics has been awarded an Applied Research Collaborative PhD Studentship by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH). Continue reading
Great Malvern Priory: venue for the podcast series launch event on Tuesday 24th May 2022
Registrations open today for the launch event of the new podcast series of Lorna’s Lloyd’s Diary of the war. This takes place at Great Malvern Priory in Worcestershire on Tuesday 24th May 2022 from 14:00 onwards.
To register (free of charge), please click on this link. This will take you to the EventBrite page at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lorna-lloyds-diary-of-the-war-podcast-launch-event-tickets-307900246927. Continue reading
My colleagues Dr Bruce Ryan, Dr Iain McGregor and I have recently learnt that a submission that we made this January has been accepted for the Archives and Records Association UK and Ireland 2022 conference. This event runs from 31st August to 2nd September 2022 in Chester. The draft conference programme for the conference is already available, and registrations open. Continue reading
Hazel Hall 