Yesterday I was in email contact an old friend of mine from our undergraduate days at the University of Birmingham. When he mentioned that he has connections to Malvern, I told him about Lorna Lloyd and our research centred on her Diary of the war, written at her parents’ house in the town. This discussion led to the discovery of the publication of a Wikipedia entry about Lloyd. Continue reading
Today is the 80th anniversary of VE Day. On this date in 1945, the Second World War allies formally accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender of its armed forces.
Amongst the articles published in The Conversation this week to mark the 80th anniversary is ‘VE Day: how personal first-hand accounts help keep everyday narratives of wartime Britain alive’. This article highlights the value of audio to bring the words of ordinary people from the Second World War directly into the present. The content of the article draws on the analysis of audience engagement with Lorna Lloyd’s Diary of the war in two online formats: (1) text and images on Blipfoto posted from 1st September 2019; (2) an eight episode podcast series that starts with diary entries from early September 1939. The analysis was first presented in an article that I co-authored with Dr Bruce Ryan, Marianne Wilson and Dr Iain McGregor, published in Archives in December 2024. Continue reading
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.
Girton College, University of Cambridge
When I first started posting entries from the Diary of the war to a Blipfoto journal in September 2019, I knew very little about its author Lorna Lloyd. I was, however, aware that she had been a student Girton College Cambridge in the 1930s. I was therefore hopeful that the College archives might hold materials related to Lorna’s time as an undergraduate student. My plan was to use these to flesh out the few details that we knew about Lorna at that time. Continue reading
Earlier this year, the Platform to Platform project team responded to a call from colleagues at the University of Oxford for submissions of Second World War stories to the Their finest hour archive. Continue reading
On Thursday 4th April, I attended a private reception to celebrate the exhibition Creative Informatics: unleashing the power of data. The exhibition was hosted at the National Museum of Scotland as part of the Edinburgh Science Festival 2024 to mark the end of the funded phase of the Creative Informatics (CI) programme. Since its inception in 2018, Edinburgh Napier University has been one of the four partners of the CI programme alongside the University of Edinburgh, Creative Edinburgh and Codebase.
Over the past five years, the programme has supported individuals and organisations in the creative industries in Edinburgh and south east 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
HOPSS project speaker Marianne Wilson
Over the past weekend, between 23rd and 25th June, Queen Margaret University hosted a conference entitled Shaking the archive: reconsidering the role of archives in contemporary society.
Yesterday, on the last morning of the conference, Marianne Wilson represented the whole Heritage organisations and podcasts scoping study (HOPSS) project team* when she delivered a presentation entitled The power of audio: presenting archives via podcasts. 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
Along with my colleagues Dr Bruce Ryan, Marianne Wilson, and Dr Iain McGregor, I am delighted that the submission that we made earlier this year to the Shaking the archive – reconsidering the role of archives in contemporary society conference has been accepted. Continue reading
