Public participation in heritage research has the potential to engage new audiences, to enlist the crowd in analysing and generating data at scale, and to invite new perspectives on our national collections. Key to releasing this potential is effective engagement of diverse audiences, and the development of workflows for the creation and re-use of data within collection discovery platforms, for training automated systems, and to give access to the citizens and researchers. We will identify ways of extending and deepening engagement across communities, proposing a best-practice framework for future citizen research projects with heritage data, informing their design and modelling. Citizen research and automation are two complementary methods for capturing and describing our increasing quantities of analogue, digital and digitised data. We propose articulating the synergies between them by developing workflows for the re-use of data beyond projects' initial focuses to provide current and future scholarship with the potential to address new research questions. Led by three IROs with significant experience of citizen research, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh (RBGE), Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) and The National Archives (TNA), and the world-leading citizen research expertise of the University of Oxford's Zooniverse with its distinctive free, open source infrastructure, community of 1.9 million volunteers worldwide, and technical expertise of having delivered over 190 crowdsourcing projects, this project is uniquely placed to research and prototype tools for deeper engagement with our collections through citizen research: to create a virtuous circle of increased and better informed public engagement that leads communities to create more collections data at scale. The project will convene expertise from across sectors to expand our citizen research community and to ensure the effective re-use of crowd-sourced data. This will be achieved by addressing the following questions: 1. How can we best engage volunteers across the nation's communities with citizen research projects, to further a shared understanding of our collections? What existing methods and data are the most successful for measuring that engagement? 2. How does the ability to navigate one's own path through the data of a citizen research project affect engagement with the project? 3. How can we verify, assess, present, and value the contributions of citizen research? 4. How can we enable the re-use of crowd-sourced data within collection discovery platforms, for training automated systems, and to give access to citizens and researchers that supports and encourages further engagement, re-use and analysis? 5. Does easy access to data created by citizen research projects affect engagement with projects? What other tools are necessary to enable meaningful access to this data?

During the AHRC project grant 'In Their Own Write' we have collected a rich canvas of the voices of poor people and their advocates between 1834 and 1900, showing that even the very poorest members of society were literate, understood the poor laws, regulations and rules, and were able and willing to resist or contest the power of the national and local state. Moreover, we have established that there were substantial chronological and spatial variations in the nature, depth and tone of the voices that we have uncovered. Such material is allowing us to write the New Poor Law history from below envisaged as the core academic output from the original grant proposal. Yet our engagement with volunteer groups, those running workhouse museum sites, users of TNA, and the teachers and schoolchildren with whom we have worked as part of our engagement and impact activities from the original grant also reveals a much wider appetite for relevant teaching resources, including an easy-to-use and visual tool for understanding, accessing and representing (through tables, graphs or maps) the vast amount of raw data that we have generated during the project. To meet this demand, a key part of the project will be a Teacher Scholar Programme, in which we will select a group of teachers from KS2 to 5 to train and develop in order for them to produce publishable lesson plans and other resources based upon the project's data. The PI, CI, other TNA staff and an Education Consultant will work with the teachers to produce detailed lesson plans, teacher notes and associated materials for different key stage levels. The group will then engage in a wider exercise to engage with and train other teachers in their use, creating a snowball effect and allowing us to have a deep and targeted impact on the school community. The cohort of teachers from the TSP and other engaged teachers will also advise and guide the project on the development of an online data visualisation tool. The use of this digital initiative was not available to us when we wrote our initial application and developed its engagement plans. Because our data on the pauper voice is so rich and extensive it is suitable for use by teachers and school students at different Key Stages. Teachers will be able to tailor the resource to the different ages, capabilities, locations and curriculum interests of class participants. Employing a series of filters the user will be able to ask questions (for example) about the place of residence, age or gender of letter writers within the collection. Having annotated the data, constructed the online maps and simultaneously made available the base data in terms of pauper, would-be pauper and advocate letters and petitions, we will publicise the tool widely through existing TNA networks and mailing lists, TNA website, volunteer groups, workhouse websites, and the workhouse network, giving the project national and international reach and impact. All products of this project will be available for free online in perpetuity. To reach the wider public the learning resources will be written into existing TNA research guides which are already well known. Indeed the four relevant TNA research guides on public health, poverty and workhouses, reach almost 30,000 researchers annually. We would update these guides to advertise the resource to researchers outside of the teaching community. These would include people in tertiary and long life learning.

This research cluster will bring together a team of key professionals, academic researchers representing AHRC/EPSRC disciplines as well as heritage practitioners to appraise the costs and risks of current environmental guidelines for cultural heritage in response to a changing climate. This theme has a national and international dimension since climate change, energy consumption, visitation and pressures for greater access to collections will continue to make considerable demand on cultural heritage in the 21st century globally. The scale and pace of these changes are posing unique challenges to managing the long-term preservation of material culture and are the focus of discussion amongst professional communities both nationally and internationally.This research cluster will inform this debate.\n\nCurrent environmental parameters and tolerances set out in national and international guidelines and standards as well as Governmental Sustainable Development Targets play a critical role in shaping practices in the cultural heritage sector such as building construction, and environmental management. This includes the control of temperature, moisture, light and pollution - the main factors affecting the conservation of material culture. Environmental guidelines impact significantly on how collections are stored, accessed, loaned and displayed. \n\nEqually, the cultural heritage sector is not immune from the challenges posed by global responsibility: reducing reliance on fossil fuels, changing behaviours in favour of re-use and alternative energy sources, for example. It is within this context the appropriateness of current environmental guidelines designed to meet an agreed standard for managing material culture change, enable visitors to access and experience collections to a seasonal standard of comfort, and provide access to collections both locally and internationally is being questioned as the 'costs' of this are being realised. Unfortunately, there are no easy or headline-grabbing answers to this problem: the risks need to be identified, the costs understood, the options appraised. \n\nEGOR will provide the necessary framework to develop thinking in this area in order to realise an intellectual step change in understanding the risks and uncertainties of current environmental guidelines, standards and targets in a changing climate. Consideration will be largely focused on indoor environments, collections and the people who engage with and work in the cultural heritage arena, and will build on foundations established by other research projects e.g. Noah's Ark (EU), Engineering our Futures (EPSRC), Living with Environmental Change (NERC) largely focused on climate impacts outdoors. This will be achieved through 5 sequential activities: \n1. An inaugural meeting of the steering group which includes professional leaders, and named investigators to shape thinking and initiate cross fertilisation of ideas and perspectives;\n2. 3 working group meetings comprising specialists in art history, engineering, material science and conservation for coherent discussion, and lively debate to understand the implication for current environmental guidelines in a changing climate for people, their values and history, buildings housing collections (often historic structures themselves) and collections. The implications will be considered against a background of global responsibility.\n3. A two-day residential event will conclude this investigative process; the three working groups will present their findings, areas of convergence and divergence will be further debated to determine the risks and uncertainties surrounding environmental guidelines and standards in a changing climate, and the outstanding research needed to fully inform this debate.\n\nA summary of the challenges and user-led research emerging within this theme will be reached at the end of the meeting and presented at the Programme conference in July 2009.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The growing availability of large digital historical datasets, coupled with the emergence of new methodologies and computer algorithms has the potential to revolutionise research in the Arts and Humanities. The right Big Data tools and approaches will deliver the potential to conduct research on the scale of entire populations - addressing key research questions and offering new insights. Significant investment has already been sunk into the creation of large-scale digital resources. This investment is delivering historical big data of a variety, complexity and coverage that is beyond the scope of existing analytical tools and techniques. Yet these tools have not yet been the subject of large investment. Researchers in this field now require rapid innovation to extend the Big Data approaches pioneered for scientific and business applications, adapting and refining these to deliver practical analytical tools to support large-scale exploration of big historical datasets. This innovative, multi-disciplinary project will address this challenge, bringing together international research experience in the digital humanities, natural language processing, information science, data mining and linked data, with large, complex and diverse 'big data' spanning over 500 years of British history. The project's technical outputs will be a methodology and supporting toolkit that identify individuals within and across historical datasets, allowing people to be traced through the records and enabling their stories to emerge from the data. The tools will handle the 'fuzzy' nature of historical data, including aliases, incomplete information, spelling variations and the errors that are inevitably encountered in official records. The toolkit will be open and configurable, offering the flexibility to formulate and ask interesting questions of the data, exploring it in ways that were not imagined when the records were created. The open approach will create opportunities for further enhancement or re-use and offers the further potential to deliver the outputs as a service, extensible to new datasets as these become available. This brings the vision of 'bring your own data' closer, to find and link individuals in new combinations of datasets, from the widest range of historical sources. The project will benefit academic and leisure historians alike, across the whole spectrum of digital history: * It will assist historians seeking evidence of life-events through a collective study of individual biographies. * It will help genealogists find and trace the paths of their ancestors across the landscape of the official record. * It will help researchers by signposting routes between historical collections, enabling links between datasets at a deep level and creating opportunities for discovery. * For cultural organizations it will illuminate effective approaches to creation and curation of new digital datasets to optimise their potential for linking and re-use. * It will provide evidence to support policy making, helping balance the demands of Data Protection and information assurance with those of open data and Freedom of Information. * It will provide a methodology to underpin the creation of new tools and resources, supporting the digital economy. The project aims to extend the boundaries of current research in three important directions: to increase the extent and diversity of the data that can be handled; to improve support for inconsistent or fuzzy data; and to enable confidence measures to be tailored to fit specific research aims. These advances will extend the practical application of data linking techniques, enabling them to be applied to the large, diverse datasets that are continually emerging, to help answer historical research questions at a macro and micro scale. Our vision is to create a generic, extensible approach to tracing the lives of real people: through time and across the documentary evidence that survives them.