The project will integrate the catalogue data and digitised resources of the J. M. Carpenter collection of traditional song and drama into the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library's (VWML) digital archive (currently known as The Full English). The Carpenter collection contains a wealth of folk songs, folk plays and other folk arts items, mostly gathered in England and Scotland in the period 1929-35 and including many early sound recordings. It has been little used for research or performance due to its accessibility. This long-awaited project capitalises on its having already been catalogued and digitised and takes the opportunity to embed it within the VVWML's digital archive, already establised as a world-leading English-language folk arts resource. It will make the collection freely and internationally available to schools and their communities, young musicians, music tutors, folk arts enthusiasts, amateur and professional performers, researchers outside the academy, communities local to the places where the collection was made, contributor descendants, special interest groups (e.g. maritime heritage), arts, culture and heritage organisations, community groups and media. It will also enable cross searching with (currently) 22 other folk arts collections, to which it has many relationships in terms of items, forms, people, dates and places. The Carpenter project team will work with the English Folk Dance and Song Society and the Elphinstone Institute, folk performers, tutors and contributor descendants to introduce the collection to a wide range of audiences with an interest in the folk arts and to promote it as an artistic and historical resource. This will result in discovery, supplementary information and knowledge exchange, creative responses such as performance, composition, artwork and writing, re-patriation of songs with the families of those who contributed them, and a coach tour of the landscape and communities which nurtured their performance in the 1930s. The resulting resource will also go on to complement the Carpenter project team's forthcoming critical edition of the collection.

With the continual unfolding of new digital technologies and possibilities, digital resources are beginning to play a significant role in the activities and experiences of "grass-roots" musicians and dancers, singers and dancers in England's contemporary folk scene. There has been a considerable growth in the popularity and profile of folk arts in England over the last fifteen years; within this wave of new interest, internet-based resources have introduced new participants to repertory, skills and information. Simultaneously, developments in solid-state digital technology mean that musicians and dancers are now making recordings of themselves and others (for instance, in sessions, using portable digital recorders or smartphones). Far from being passive consumers of this digital media, musicians and dancers are actively developing new ways to assimilate and utilise the materials they find and generate. Amateur and professional musicians and dancers are engaging with a growing wealth of digital resources ranging from internet-based archives (e.g. The Full English) to self-generated recordings and transcriptions. The extent and nature of the impact of these digital/digitised materials to individuals, groups, amateurs, professionals and activists within England's folk scene are as yet somewhat assumed, largely unclear and under-examined, and the focus of the 'Digital Folk' project. 'Digital Folk' will look in detail at the uses, distributions and impacts of digital/digitised materials (e.g. recordings/transcriptions/manuscript reproductions) within English folk arts cultures. The research will involve observing musicians and dancers and dancers as they utilise or otherwise engage with various materials, and will move towards building a picture of the ways in which users interact with different types and formats of resource. It will look to understand how such materials impact on the ways in which folk musicians and dancers interact with each other, and will consider the online networks and relationships that emerge between the practitioners, in order to discover how the sharing and exchange of such materials transform the social nature of folk culture. Finally, it will examine the ways in which, and extent to which, digitally-oriented activities intersect with face-to-face "real-world" interactions, and how the modernity of such activities is accommodated within new concepts of 'tradition'. The project will aim to develop a new understanding of the ramifications of digital resources for development and change in the content, concept and practice of folk arts in contemporary England. To do this, the project will address the following questions: 1. How do traditional musicians and dancers in England use digital resources? What are the most common uses of such resources by folk musicians and dancers? What opportunities are folk musicians and dancers able to explore through those resources? 2. How do folk/traditional musicians and dancers in England conceptualise their engagements with digital resources? Do they consider the use of modern digital tools and media in relation to the "traditional" nature of the music they perform? If so, how? 3. What are the emerging impacts of digital resources on the artistic and cultural attributes of England's folk arts? What impacts can be observed, and what affects appear imminent?

The proposed programme of follow-on work enhances the impact of the earlier AHRC-funded research project, 'The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain 1905-2016' (RoP). This project drew on documentary, visual and oral history sources to provide an authoritative treatment of a subject that had largely escaped academic scrutiny. Historical pageants were one of the most important and ubiquitous channels of popular engagement with the past in twentieth-century Britain: communities of all sizes came together to stage theatrical re-enactments of local and national history, often involving thousands of performers and tens of thousands of spectators. The original RoP project considered the social organisation, dramatic content and wider cultural significance of historical pageants, using locally held sources across the country to examine how communities and institutions told their own histories. The central output was a free-to-use, fully searchable online database that now contains details of more than 650 pageants (www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/). In collaboration with project partners in Bury St Edmunds, Carlisle, St Albans and Scarborough, the RoP team also produced a series of successful exhibitions, workshops and other events, stimulating public engagement with the research. Involving one existing and four new project partners, as well as other collaborating organisations, the follow-on activity will extend and deepen the non-academic impact of the research. It will do this by deploying techniques of public engagement that were not exploited in the original RoP project, including dramatic and musical re-performance and the use of film. It will also result in the first national-level exhibition on historical pageantry. The key elements of the follow-on project are: 1. A 30-minute documentary film, produced in partnership with the Windrose Rural Media Trust, telling the history of pageantry across Britain and including re-performed pageant scenes and music, as well as existing footage; 2. A programme of activities at Eversley, Hampshire, and St Albans, Hertfordshire, co-organised with project partners and engaging both adults and children in re-performances and other activities connected with pageantry, alongside new exhibitions focusing on those localities; 3. A local history fair at Cecil Sharp House, London, organised in partnership with the English Folk Dance and Song Society. This will bring together local historians and heritage sector organisations, many of whom have an active interest in undertaking research into, and staging exhibitions about, historical pageantry. It will also include an element of re-performance, and will take place alongside an exhibition in the same location, focusing on the links between historical pageantry and the folk arts; 4. The production of a 30-page Guide to the study of pageants, aimed at local history and heritage communities and available online and in hard copy; 5. A series of activities at Axbridge, Somerset, in partnership with Axbridge Pageant Association, during its preparations for the 2020 Axbridge Pageant; 6. A 'roadshow' of events in three locations - Glasgow, York and Dorset - at which members of the project team will share the results of their research, including the film and Guide, with project partners and other collaborators, and help to build further capacity for local history research into the pageant tradition. Through these activities, the follow-on project will extend the reach of the RoP project, while also promoting independent and collaborative research at a local level into an important and stimulating aspect of modern British community history.