Abstract
What are participants and researchers agreeing to when they consent to having data archived and what do they imagine the future life of their data to be? In this paper, we reflect on a project that deliberately started rather than ended with the archive. The Everyday Childhoods project invited children and their families to take part in the creation of an open access public archive documenting everyday childhoods using a range of multimedia data. Families and researchers were invited into the archive, encouraged to imagine different kinds of secondary use and to speak directly to future user of their data through short films and postcards. This paper raises questions concerning the place of the archive in different disciplinary traditions; the roles of researcher and archivist in safekeeping, gatekeeping and caring for data collections; and the place of qualitative longitudinal research as a site of innovation within a new data landscape.
Highlights
What are participants and researchers agreeing to when they consent to having data archived and what do they imagine the future life of their data to be? In this paper, we reflect on a project that deliberately started rather than ended with the archive
This paper proposes that for qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) to address these issues, it is necessary to ‘start with the archive’ in research – orienting ourselves from the beginning to the challenges and opportunities that the digital landscape presents for research and archiving
Certain qualitative longitudinal datasets such as Timescapes and the Mass Observation (MO) Archive have become a focus of data re-use and have formed the testbed for experimentation and innovation (Hubble, 2005; Timescapes, 2019)
Summary
What are participants and researchers agreeing to when they consent to having data archived and what do they imagine the future life of their data to be? In this paper, we reflect on a project that deliberately started rather than ended with the archive. The Timescapes archive has continued to be an important resource for qualitative longitudinal enquiry and innovation, including the utilisation of big data approaches to text analysis (Andrade and Andersen, 2020; Edwards et al, 2019) and the linking qualitative and quantitative longitudinal data sources (Elliot, 2008; Irwin, 2009, 2020; Østergaard and Thomson, 2020; Sharland et al, 2017; Thompson, 2004). This ‘data re-use’ trajectory has a distinctive character yet remains in conversation with insights from interdisciplinary archive studies. The field of community archiving is increasingly recognised as an important space for innovation, breaking down some of the divisions between researcher/ researched and front stage/backstage that have shaped academic enquiry and associated ethical debates around confidentiality, anonymity and ownership (Flinn, 2007; Hughes and Tarrant, 2020b; Moore, 2017)
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