Using Archives to Conduct Collaborative Research on Language and Region

Abstract

The Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC) is a large, multimedia archive relating to the study of dialect and folk life in England. It comprises all of the materials from the Survey of English Dialects (conducted at the University of Leeds from the 1950s-60s, to date it is the only complete study of the dialects of England), and the output from Leeds’ former Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies (IDFLS), extant from 1964 until the early 1980s. The LAVC is a unique, valuable and important resource, but nowadays its use is mostly confined to ad-hoc consultation by individual researchers. The Language, History, Place project is breathing new life into this historical archive by re-birthing it for the twenty-first century. Working in collaboration with folk life museums’ contemporaneous collections of vernacular culture artefacts, it uses the LAVC as a catalyst for generating new and present-day linguistic research data through a programme of public engagement initiatives set within the local communities from which the archive materials originally came. This chapter explores the substantial research opportunities and benefits offered by reuniting tangible and intangible heritage within the museum context. Visitors are invited to respond and to collaborate with the project by contributing their own linguistic heritage via a series of enactive engagement activities (Hooper-Greenhill, 1994), thus providing new comparative language data and augmenting the archive. Also discussed are the intellectual and methodological challenges associated with trying to reuse archive data for purposes for which it was never originally intended. What is and is not possible, defensible, or allowable? And can one collect useful sociolinguistic research data using such methods, whilst at the same time significantly enriching museum collections and providing an enhanced, enjoyable and stimulating visitor experience?