The Pararchive Project

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will be a gathering place to experience narrative art and the evolution of moving images – from illustration to cinema to the digital mediums of the future. The museum’s seed collection – a gift from founder George Lucas – spans a century-and-a-half and features the images and the mediums…

Strange that with all our talk of Fatality Servers hosting plans, we haven’t made reference to Minecraft yet. Just reading through this excellent article on Medium I was struck by the following quote. In the 2010s and beyond, it is not the case that every cultural product ought to be a generative, networked system. It…

The Pararchive team’s breakout session from this month’s AHRC Connected Communities Festival in Cardiff* is now available on Youtube… Introductions from Fiona Philip and Simon Popple. Researching Collections at the Science Museum, Alison Hess From Bute to Butetown, Paul Duffy Ceramic City Stories, Danny Callaghan and Jane Wells Designing Pararchive, Imran Ali *We all thought it was kinda…

Can you “reverse engineer” a museum piece? Will this allow us to take historical objects out of the museum and put it to use again? Can you turn heritage into new design? How can we link these objects to the historical information that is stored in the museum? How would people interact with these “enriched”…

We are proud to announce East Street Arts (ESA) as a partner on Pararchive. ESA is a contemporary arts  organisation in Leeds, established to facilitate the development of visual artists through an in-house events programme, membership activities, professional development and studio/facility provision. ESA is a registered charity founded in 1993 at East Street Mills by…

I’ve tried to set up Cowbird to be a timeless project, as opposed to a timely project. Cowbird tries to encourage a deeper, more personal, longer lasting kind of self-expression than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Internet. It doesn’t necessarily follow all of the latest design trends, but hopefully it’s a space that…

Connecting Communities: Storytelling and the Digital Archive CALL FOR PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS Date: Friday 27th – Saturday 28th March 2015 Venue: Stage@Leeds, University of Leeds, Leeds, U.K This AHRC-funded conference and community showcase marks the climax of an eighteen-month multidisciplinary research project entitled Pararchive: Open Access Community Storytelling and the Digital Archive (www.pararchive.com). The project…

Earlier this month, members of the wider Pararchive team were invited to host a 90-minute breakout session on our project at the Connected Communities festival. I closed the segment with some reflections on our approach to design & community storytelling; here’s my talk… Hey everyone, my name is Imran Ali. I’m one of the founders of Carbon Imagineering, a digital…

We are proud to announce Morley Community Archives (MCA) as a partner on Pararchive. Comprising a small group of volunteers who have undertaken to preserve archive material relating to Morley for future generations and to make it available for public use, MCA is non-profit making and is based in the David Atkinson Archive Room in…

Following the Connected Communities festival Fiona and I headed over to Madlab to join Bokeh Yeah for their monthly meetup. This session was to be dedicated to hearing pitches for the group’s documentary challenge for Pararchive, then allowing the group to select four ideas that will go on to be produced. The competing ideas included…