Mass Observation Archive Research Articles

Space, text and selfhood: encounters with the personal computer in the mass observation project archive, 1991–2004

ABSTRACT While the advent of the personal computer in 1990s Britain has been well documented by historians of computing and technology, there remains little research on the everyday experience of this phenomenon. In this article, we use material held in The Mass Observation Project (MOP) archive to explore the way men and women in late-modern Britain experienced and understood the changes brought about by personal computing. The reflexive and yet private nature of responses held in the MOP archive make it an important window into the cultural and social contexts in which personal computers were encountered. Our research indicates that the advent of the personal computer brought about a number of historically-specific changes in the way Mass Observers scribed and composed their written communications. The processes through which people turned ideas into text were irreversibly recalibrated by the possibilities of saving, editing, copy and pasting on screen. As personal computer resources moved from being predominantly accessible at work to being a staple part of the home, the lines between labour and leisure, business and pleasure and the personal and the professional were blurred. Ultimately, evidence from the Mass Observation Archive indicates that the advent of the personal computer had a significant effect on the processes through which individuals composed a sense of self on a day-to-day basis. It introduced new tensions, possibilities and anxieties to the act of negotiating a ‘modern’ identity. Building on this insight, our paper makes interventions in two areas: the history of writing and the history of the home. Placed alongside one another, these findings open up suggestive new questions for the heavily contested historiographical trope of the late-modern ‘self’.

Note on recruitment as an ethical question: lessons from a project on asexuality

This short piece considers how participant recruitment can have ethical elements. With reference to a qualitative research project on asexuality we explore the challenges associated with recruiting from an emerging, and politically charged, identity group. In our attempt to broaden the representation of asexual stories we sought to recruit people who may not fully identify with the emerging term ‘asexual’ as a sexual orientation while also not equating this with a lifestyle choice of abstinence. This was attempted through crafting suitable recruitment materials via the use of the Mass Observation archive and expanded sampling criteria. Our efforts met with mixed success, on which we reflect. We conclude by suggesting how such ethical questions related to recruitment will remain ‘gaps’ in ethical regulation, calling for a greater reflexive approach from researchers about sampling criteria.

Golden age, apathy or stealth? Democratic engagement in Britain, 1945–1950

This article revisits democratic engagement in post-war Britain in a context of debates about political disaffection in the current period. The study systematically reanalysed volunteer writing in the Mass Observation Archive and represents a significant methodological advance on previous studies. Little evidence was found to support common existing interpretations: whether ‘golden age’ narratives of deference to authority, partisan alignment and high voter turnout or revisionist accounts of apathy. Instead, evidence was found of something akin to what Hibbing and Theiss-Morse call ‘stealth democracy’. Citizens thought democracy to be important and felt a duty to vote, but wished for government by experts in the national interest. This ‘stealth’ interpretation builds on existing studies of duty, populism and expertise in twentieth-century Britain. It helps to move discussion of democratic engagement after the Second World War beyond the binaries of self/collective and private/public, and to explain the paradox of high voter turnout in a context of hostility to party politics. It also promises to inform debates about declining political support in the current period.

Pronouns and identity: A case study from a 1930s working-class community

Abstract This article investigates the relationship between certain pronoun uses and identity in a 1930s working class community. It is based on a corpus of informal conversations drawn from the Mass-Observation archive, a sociological and anthropological study of the Bolton (UK) working class at this time. The article argues that certain pronoun uses in the corpus can only be explained as homophoric reference, a kind of reference which depends on implicit agreement about the intended referent of the pronoun. The article then discusses the basis on which this implicit agreement could operate: shared culture and knowledge and a tight network of social relations. In the conclusion, two particular questions are raised: 1) How far can the homophoric reference described be related to social class? 2) When does (dialect) grammar become pragmatics?

Using Narrative Sources from the Mass Observation Archive to Study Everyday Food and Families in Hard Times: Food Practices in England during 1950

By using examples from food and domestic life in England during 1950, this paper examines the use of narrative archival sources as a methodological alternative to researching everyday food practices by traditional research methods, such as interviewing. Through the analysis of three diaries written for the Mass Observation Archive, and the everyday food practices expressed in these diaries, we consider the benefits and challenges of using narrative archival diary data to gain insights into food and eating during times of austerity. Before presenting and discussing the cases, we outline some of the challenges of researching food practices as a result of the muted, moral and mundane aspects of such practices. We then describe the study on which this paper is based, including a discussion of our methods and the reasons for using diaries and selecting our cases. Following this, we set the scene for understanding food and eating in 1950s Britain, such as contextual background about rationing during the Second World War, government policy and propaganda of the time. In our analysis of the three diaries, we discuss some of the ways in which the data have enabled us to ‘get at’ and provide insights into habitual food practices.

Claire Langhamer. The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution.

In this important monograph, Claire Langhamer joins the coterie of historians who contribute to the history of emotions by providing a close study of a particular emotion: love. As Langhamer explains, she wants to show the ways that “[l]ove has a history” (p. 4). She makes use of a wide range of primary sources including newspapers and magazines, television programs and popular films, and scholarly and popular books, though the foundation of the book rests with materials from the Mass Observation Archive. Langhamer focuses on how the English made sense of love and marriage between 1920 and 1970, a period she considers the “golden age of marriage” (p. 4). Ultimately, Langhamer creates a social history of how the English understood the interaction of heterosexual love and commitment during that 50-year span. According to Langhamer, the twentieth century saw a number of significant shifts in how the English saw love and marriage. Increasingly, people stressed the pleasurable aspects of marriage, but the growing importance of pleasure put new stresses on the institution. Instead of seeing marriage in terms of contracts, social roles, or economic demands, people began to value romantic love and sexual satisfaction and began to see marriage as a way to contain the destabilizing effects of desire. However, as Langhamer shows, the binding of love to marriage created an inherently unstable foundation. The failure to achieve happiness, sexual satisfaction, or love could demand the dissolution of a marriage. In effect, the centrality of love to a meaningful life demanded divorce reform and remarriage. Her boldest claim, therefore, is that the new demands on marriage caused its implosion rather than the conventional narrative that posits that youth culture, anti-establishment ideologies, or feminism brought about marriage's supposed demise.

Reviews

Reviews

Garden Stories: Auto/biography, Gender and Gardening

Life writing in the form of a single garden story is used in this paper to examine the garden as a powerful theme in gendered leisure. I explore the ways in which garden narratives in the form of auto/biography can represent new identities in everyday life. One women's life story is (re)told; about her childhood, her home and family, and her work in the garden. I conclude that life stories contained in the Mass Observation Archive (big and small) are useful ways of studying gendered lives to gain deeper understandings of the uses and meanings of leisure spaces in and around the home.

A Sociologist's Field Notes to the Mass Observation Archive: A Consideration of the Challenges of ‘re-Using’ Mass Observation Data in a Longitudinal Mixed-Methods Study

This paper explores the challenges arising from the ‘re-use’ of Mass Observation Project (MOP) writing (1981 to present day) encountered by the authors when setting up an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded, longitudinal, mixed-methods research project on civic engagement. The paper begins with a brief review of the present UK social science research environment, highlighting the evidence for an increasing Research Council focus on interdisciplinary research and secondary analysis/re-use of data. It argues that this shift in focus gives rise to unique methodological challenges such as those encountered by the authors in this project. After providing some background and context, the paper discusses different obstacles encountered in the course of setting up this project. These include difficulties in: communicating within and across disciplines; re-using data across disciplines; the use of metadata, and its role in choosing writers from a longitudinal secondary data source; choice of analytical tools and approaches; and the Mass Observation writer's role in the research process. By sharing these experiences, the paper seeks to enable potential users of the MOP to see the value of MOP as a source of longitudinal qualitative secondary data; appreciate its potential for use with other data sources and across different disciplines; and equip other researchers to meet some of the challenges that the longitudinal use of MOP writing throws up.

The Materiality of Method: The Case of the Mass Observation Archive

The Mass Observation Archive presents numerous methodological issues for social researchers. The data are idiosyncratic, difficult to analyze, and the sample design is nonsystematic. Such issues seriously challenge conventional social research protocols. This article highlights a further characteristic of the archive: its unwieldy materiality. Focusing on the sensory experiences of the archive and its particular type of data, the article shows how the experience of getting ‘dirty with data’ plays a real and dynamic part of conducting Mass Observation research. Building on these observations, and drawing on two recent projects that have used the Archive, we reflect on the extent to which these issues are genuinely methodologically problematic, and how far the materiality of method and the sensuousness of data play a part in other research sites and methodological approaches too. In doing so, we emphasize the physical and logistical practicalities involved in engaging with all kinds of data, and highlight the opportunities as well as the constraints that these pose. We draw attention to the sensuous ‘cues’ and ‘hints’ offered by the Archive's materiality, and explore different ways of responding to these and their likely implications for the type and status of outputs produced. Finally, we consider the implications of our discussion for possible future attempts to digitize the contents of the Archive.

‘Food hates’ over the life course: an analysis of food narratives from the UK Mass Observation Archive

This article presents data from the UK Mass Observation Archive drawn from the 1982 Winter Food Directive, which focuses on memories of childhood food ‘hates’. Through our analysis of these data, we identify three main findings: (a) there is a discrepancy between individual-level and collective aggregate level food hates, which problematises the notion of commensality; (b) a small but powerful ‘outlier’ group of respondents, which we refer to as ‘visceral repulsors’, show relatively extreme reactions to certain foods throughout their lives; and (c) the duration and temporalities of food hates can be used to sketch a rough model of change and continuity of food hates over the life course. Finally, the discussion focuses on the food hate trajectories through the life course, situated in a social context, to explore the implications the findings may have for food and health policy more generally.

All-in Wrestling in Inter-War Britain: Science and Spectacle in Mass Observation's ‘Worktown’

All-in wrestling was established as a spectator sport in the 1930s and appealed primarily to a working-class audience. All-in was controversial because of its excessive violence and its blend of the spectacular and dramatic with sport, which led to accusations that it was not really a sport. Nevertheless, it retained many characteristics of sport, and audiences consumed it as such. All-in wrestling was an outcome of the evolution of a traditional ancient sport into a commercial entertainment and represented an extreme conflation of sport and drama. Using records of All-in wrestling in the Mass Observation Archive, this paper explores the ways in which audiences negotiated the tensions between sport and spectacle.

Remembering radio

Abstract The article concerns a part of a wider project, ‘A Remembered Soundscape’, in which I am attempting to recapture the sounds of my childhood and to write about them as, what Murray Shafer has called, an ‘earwitness’. The focus here is on the remembered experience of radio listening over two decades between the late 1930s and the late 1950s, a time when ‘the wireless’ was the most significant source of mediated sound. Memories of listening in the setting of the home are compared with the contemporary experience of encountering archival recordings. An added motivation for the project is the challenge of trying to develop the limited vocabulary that relates to sound. Since ‘memory is partial’ (Kuhn) and ‘what it contrives symptomatically to forget is as important as what it remembers’ (Samuel), recall is checked against family and public documentation – family diaries and letters, and records in Mass Observation Archive. Examples are given of remembered radio programmes and the everyday domestic context within which they were first heard and embedded. The pace, accent and intonation of these examples, heard in the present day, are what are found most alien in this exercise in self-ethnography.

GEOFFREY G. FIELD. Blood, Sweat, and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939-1945.

World War II and the working class are hardly topics that historians of Britain can be accused of ignoring. Geoffrey G. Field brings the two together here, critiquing the historiography that has emphasized national unity and the rhetoric of a “people's war,” as well as those who regard the war's political results by 1945 as representing either a policy consensus or an indifferent apathetic popular politics. Field's case is that the dominant category fashioning popular experience of the war was class, and that class was altered by the war. He contends that “the war experience nationalized workers, both in a patriotic sense and in forging closer class unity and the sense of a common political agenda” (p. 6). Blood, Sweat, and Toil then can be located alongside the works of those historians who have reasserted the salience of class in mid-twentieth-century British history—notably James Hinton, Selina Todd, Jon Lawrence, and Mike Savage. And if Field's book lacks some of their conceptual engagement or forensic subtlety, it compensates by covering a broad sweep of wartime life: the Blitz, evacuation, children, work, the family, leisure, film, J. B. Priestley, the BBC, politics, and—importantly, since this is not just a home front history—non-civilian experience. The book is at its best in vivid, traditional social history accounts of the dislocations wrought by war, the transformation of everyday practices like shopping by bombing as well as rationing. Field delves into the Beveridge Report, the black economy, women's parliaments, the land army, and the people's convention, amongst other topics. Many of these have been well documented by historians, and in addition to government reports, opinion polls, the Mass Observation Archive, and diaries, Field mines the extensive secondary literature to great effect. With the occasional recent exception (Alan Allport's work on the emotional traumas of demobilization; Andrew Thorpe's look at micropolitics in Parties at War: Political Organization in Second World War Britain [2009]), the real achievement of Blood, Sweat, and Toil is its masterful synthesis of the war's voluminous bibliography (not that there is a bibliography in the book itself, unfortunately).

Peaceful, Pleasant and Private: The British Domestic Garden as an Ordinary Landscape

This paper uses narrative accounts of private gardens in Britain from the Mass-Observation Archive (MO) to explore ideas of landscape, privacy and attachment that emerge from daily practices and routines in these ordinary domestic spaces. We argue for the domestic garden as a vernacular or ordinary landscape that displays tensions between the private and the public nature of home within ambivalent emotional responses. Extended personal narratives offer privileged access to a site of intense engagement and carefully guarded privacy, yet with varying levels of attachment. The garden is a space well described in Britain in its public form but less well known as a private, everyday landscape. In this way a cultural landscape study becomes a contemporary critical geography of an ordinary space.

Listlessness in the Archive

Listlessness in the Archive

Human—Landscape Relations and the Occupation of Space: Experiencing and Expressing Domestic Gardens

A consideration of occupation and space is outlined to advance nonrepresentational thinking about human—landscape relations. Empirical findings are presented from a research project based on data from the Mass Observation Archive relevant to gardens and gardening. These data are analysed to explore how ‘ordinary’ people (who have contributed to this Archive) express and experience issues concerning their home gardens. Our analysis suggests four distinct modes of occupation relevant to the ways in which these lay writers describe their garden and gardening experiences and activities. The naturalistic mode is occupied with the garden as expressive of ‘nature’; the nostalgic mode is occupied with memory and self-reflection; the pragmatic mode concerns tasks/activities that constitute the routine practices of gardening; and the mimetic mode is occupied with the interpersonal dynamics and processes of human social activity. The analysis is situated in the theoretical context of some recent developments in nonrepresentational theory. We suggest that our approach and data are compatible with the process-orientation of nonrepresentational thinkers, and that—contrary to certain objectivist tendencies within nonrepresentational theorising—this approach does not need to neglect the importance of issues of subjectivity and experience, and the relevance of textual data. We aim to lend empirical substance to recent theoretical and philosophical discussions on space, and speculations about why the home garden appears to be so important to many people.

New, Old, Indifferent: The United Kingdom’s Preferences Regarding the Architecture and Design of Public Libraries

Objective – Analysis and discussion of attitudes of U.K. citizens toward the architecture and design of the country’s public libraries.
 
 Design – Content analysis of essays submitted to the U.K. Mass Observation Archive (MOA).
 
 Setting – Citizens of the United Kingdom.
 
 Subjects – 180 respondents from a panel of 500 Mass Observation Archive (MOA) volunteers. 
 
 Methods – The MOA originated in the 1930s as a way to gather qualitative evidence regarding everyday life of the British public. Most of the data gathered takes the form of variable length essays written by a panel of 500 anonymous volunteers. The volunteers respond to specific directives, and in this article, Black summarized responses to a directive he originally posed to the 500 volunteers in 2005: ‘Public Library Buildings’. Black issued this particular directive to the panel of volunteers in the autumn of 2005 and results were made available to the public by mid-2006.The MOA received a total of 180 responses, of which 121 were from women and 59 were from men. Both users of libraries and non-users were included in the sample. The respondents were not a representative sample of the British public because men, ethnic minorities, lower socio-economic groups, and those living outside of the South of England were underrepresented. 
 
 The author analyzed the content of the 180 submitted essays to gain insight on attitudes regarding public library design and architecture. Respondents were asked about public library location, environmental fit, architectural style, sensory aspects of the building, and whether or not the building resembled other types of public buildings. Although he posed several questions, Black focused on answers to three questions: what do you think about the design of modern library buildings? Do you prefer them to older style buildings? Have you seen older libraries renovated into more modern libraries, and what do you think of them? Black then analyzed the responses and grouped them into four major attitudes toward the architecture and design of public libraries. The author chose not to code any of the responses and instead chose to analyze the ‘discourse’ in and not necessarily the ‘content’ of the essays. After analyzing the discourse, Black contextualized the evidence he discovered. He then discussed political and cultural issues with relation to the four major attitudes and how these issues affected the current landscape of libraries. 
 
 Main Results – The four major categories derived from the essays that Black analyzed included: preference for the new; preference for the old; preference for a mixing of the old and the new; architectural indifference, the library as ‘place’ and the concept of ‘libraryness.’ Those with a preference for the new preferred the newer, more modern building because it fit better within the world of information technology. These respondents also felt that the older buildings were too intimidating and cold. Those who preferred the older architecture and design felt that the buildings allowed them to access a piece of the past, and they thought an older library to be more impressive, historic, and generally have more elaborate and interesting architecture. These respondents pointed out the fewer places to hide in new libraries, and indicated that new architecture is boring and stolid. The third group of respondents preferred an older exterior, but an up-to-date interior with a more modern infrastructure. They enjoyed the large impressive buildings but liked the interior to contain comfortable, modern furniture, good lighting, as well as updated technological tools. Finally, the remaining group of respondents did not place importance on the physical space of a library, but more so the services and collections within the physical space. 
 
 Conclusion – The discourse derived from the MOA and analyzed in Black’s article summarizes the attitudes and preferences that citizens of the UK have regarding public library architecture. Among the 180 responses to the ‘Public Library Buildings’ directive, there is a clear tension in these attitudes and preferences. The information gathered in the MOA directive on public libraries could also provide political and cultural leaders with evidence of a need for renewal or rethinking of the country’s public libraries.

Britain Finds Andy Hardy: British Cinema Audiences and The American Way of Life in The Second World War

The years 1942 and 1943 saw great concern, on both sides of the Atlantic, about Anglo-American understanding. Almost one million American servicemen were to arrive on British shores by the end of 1...

‘A Slice of Life’: Food Narratives and Menus from Mass-Observers in 1982 and 1945

This paper reports on an analysis of hitherto unexamined documentary data on food held within the UK Mass Observation Archive (MOA). In particular it discusses responses to the 1982 Winter Directive which asked MOA correspondents about their experiences of food and eating, and the food diaries submitted by MOA panel members in 1945. What is striking about these data is the extent to which memories of food and eating are interwoven with recollections of the lifecourse; in particular social relations, family life, and work. It seems asking people about food generates insight into aspects of everyday life. In essence, memories of food provide a crucial and potentially overlooked medium for developing an appreciation of social change. We propose the concept ‘food narratives’ to capture the essence of these reflections because they reveal something more than personal stories; they are both individual and collective experiences in that personal food narratives draw upon shared cultural repertoires, generational memories, and tensions between age cohorts. Food narratives are embodied and embedded in social networks, socio-cultural contexts and socio-economic epochs. Thus the daily menus recorded in 1945 and memories scribed in 1982 do not simply communicate what people ate, liked and disliked but throw light on two contrasting moments of British history; the end of the second world war and an era of transition, reform, individualization, diversity which was taking place in the early 1980s.