The Pararchive Project

Read about an archivist’s interesting experience of conducting research in another archive, something they compare to “being a guest in someone’s home in a different country and culture”.

“The Internet Archive turns 20 years old next year, having archived nearly two decades and 23 petabytes of the evolution of the World Wide Web. Yet, surprisingly little is known about what exactly is in the Archive’s vaunted Wayback Machine. Beyond saying it has archived more than 445 billion webpages, the Archive has never published…

The term Deep Hanging Out was coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz to describe the anthropological research method of immersing oneself in a immersed in a cultural, group or social experience on an informal level. Observations gleaned from deep hanging out may typically end up being the most poignant insights of one’s anthropological research. In contrast…

It’s easy to become cynical about the current fashion of story as the metaphor for everything from politics to religion to marketing to design. Indeed, I find myself rolling my eyes as another story-centric service is launched at us. However story is at the heart of Pararchive and Yarn and for a good reason. Dean…

Since Imran, Tom and myself started working on the Pararchive project back in October 2013, its working title has been something of a running joke. While it worked as a reminder of what the project aimed to achieve (a ‘parallel archive’ of individual, rather than institutional, commentary on archival material), it was clumsy shorthand. Besides,…

From the very beginning of the project, the Pararchive team has toyed with the notion of digitising archival artefacts as 3D objects, though we’ve also had mixed opinions on whether this would be useful or indeed desirable. Recently, however, researchers at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen experimenting with laser scanning of heritage sites, 3D visualisations and…

For an unknown face, the system searches through a database of 146m images, culled from 50,000 BBC News programmes in around 30 seconds. Once a face has been learnt by the system future searches will only take a few seconds. Oxford’s research suggests that faster performance on much bigger databases would be straightforward, so we’re…

A new AHRC publication has been launched to publicise the Research for Community Heritage initiative. Part of the cross-Council Connected Communities programme, the initiative began in 2012 with funding awarded to 21 universities to explore partnerships with community groups interested in applying to the Heritage Fund’s ‘All Our Stories’ programme… Download the full report from……