Unarchiving a digital archive-how an oral history project was brought back online after retirement

Miriam Silverman

About Humap

Humap is designed to show stories of place in a highly visual way, allowing serendipitous exploration via map, text search, tags and collections. Features can include user-generated content, embedded or standalone sites, multiple map instances and data integration. We are working on a number of really exciting projects in academia, local authorities and museums, everything from the archaeology of ancient places and migration stories of refugees to significant places associated with the LGBT community. If you would like to know more about how Humap might work for your project, please do contact Miriam at Miriam@humap.me, visit our site at Humap.me and check out some of our sites at coventryatlas.org and layersoflondon.org. 

The Mapping Memory Project

Since the evolution of the web-based maps in the mid noughties, countless heritage map projects have been launched onto the world. While some thrived, many died, subject to funds finishing, lack of staffing time and overly complex and confusing tools that kept breaking. So many great ideas and hard work were lost or limped to a slow death. This continues to be true to this day, longevity being conceived in terms of three or four years, no matter the efforts gone into the project at the outset. 

In 2010, The University of Liverpool, in partnership with The Maritime Museum, National Museums Liverpool and Re-Dock received grant funding from the Arts & Humanities Research Council’s Beyond Text Research Programme to develop a digital oral history project called ‘Mapping Memory on the Liverpool Waterfront since the 1950s’. After a period of research, the map element was launched, to exist online for a period of three years. Stories of dock workers, commuters, sailors, and locals were captured in oral and video testimony, along with historic imagery from 50’s to the 70’s, a period of great change for the city. 

The project was well received by educators, community interest groups, and by locals, heralded as an accessible interactive map which allowed a non-technical audience to discover research findings in the context of place. 

Several years later, one of the great cultural and historical map projects of the decade was conceived, LayersofLondon.org. Instigated by the Institute of Historical Research, it was designed by Error Agency, who were asked to put usability and community at the heart of project. In the two years after launch, it gained 650,000 page views, contained over 12,000 records and had numerous communities adding their maps and stories to it, creating an engaging view of London’s past and present and catering to many different audiences in an intuitive and inclusive way. 

Seeing its popularity, Error Agency decided to create a new mapping product based on the experiences of Layers of London, but this time on a serviced platform for many different map projects. Like Layers of London, Humap contains rich record pins and map overlays but it is faster, more user friendly and works wonderfully on mobile devices. New features have been added including collections of records and walking trails (see Figures 1-4 for examples from the Mapping Memory project)

While many new projects are being launched onto Humap such as coventryatlas.org, one of most heartening outcomes is that it turned out to be a chance to reach back to those old projects of years ago and give them new life. The first of these is the Mapping Memory map. 

After nearly a decade, in 2019 –far later than was ever anticipated – the Mapping Memory project disappeared from its online home on the National Museums Liverpool’s website. Gone, and missed by many as a unique record of life on the waterfront. Error Agency, who had been responsible for the design and development of Mapping Memory, approached National Museums Liverpool for approval to ‘unarchive’ what had become the Mapping Memory digital archive.  

The Mapping Memory project now has a new home. It is also a much more modern look than the original. The videos are as compelling as ever and the stories as moving, while walking trails have been added as a new feature. 

Why is this important? The truth is many heritage digital projects have little longevity although they begin with the best of intentions. Maintaining a site technically, managing traffic and user engagement while also keeping an interactive map easy to navigate and enjoyable are difficult when staff time and funding are limited. Yet the ideas behind these mapping sites are sound and vital to the recording of people’s history, especially since their initial execution required much effort and passion to get off the ground. Humap is intended to be the solution to these problems, putting the stories in the records first and informing and delighting an audience into the foreseeable future.

Explore the Liverpool Waterfront archive at: mappingmemory.org 

Find out more about the project in this Youtube video: Mapping Memory on the Liverpool Waterfront since the 1950s

Author  

Miriam Silverman, Head of Partnerships, Humap Ltd 
miriam@humap.me 

Miriam has worked in the heritage sector for many years. Educated as a historian, she was initially involved in the field of business history, later switching to family and local history. In her nine years at Ancestry.com, she created partnerships with many organisations, including the London Metropolitan Archives, Royal College of Nurses and the Wellcome Trust. After Ancestry, she began writing a book about walking in London and provided freelance historical research for a number of projects. She joined Humap last year and is responsible for taking it out into the world wherever a need arises for an online interactive digital map.