{"id":1317,"date":"2019-01-23T18:46:24","date_gmt":"2019-01-23T18:46:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/?p=1317"},"modified":"2020-06-19T12:17:16","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T11:17:16","slug":"making-collaborative-research-more-collaborative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/?p=1317","title":{"rendered":"Making collaborative research \u2026 more collaborative!"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

In this blog, Dr Mike Esbester, senior lecturer in history at Portsmouth, discusses your chance to get involved in the research project he co-leads, looking at safety and accidents on British and Irish railways at the start of the 20th<\/sup> century. Mike\u2019s research and teaching focus on the everyday, including ideas about mobility and accidents in modern Britain.<\/strong> \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

One of the great aspects of the \u2018Railway Work, Life & Death<\/a>\u2019 project, which I co-lead with colleagues at the National Railway Museum in York (NRM) and the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick (MRC), has been its collaborative nature. As well as working across institutions and professional boundaries (being led by an academic, a librarian and an archivist), the element that has been key to our success has been our volunteers.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

We\u2019re now working on records about railway worker accidents with teams of volunteers at the NRM, MRC and The National Archives. From a relatively small start about 18 months ago, we\u2019ve been growing in size and coverage \u2013 our recent project extensions will expand our current dataset from about 4,500 individuals involved in accidents on Britain and Ireland\u2019s railways between 1911 and 1923, to perhaps 70,000 between the 1870s and late 1930s. (You can read more about these developments on the project\u2019s blog, here<\/a>.)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Some of the volunteering has been done remotely, and some of it has been done in person, at the archives. In both cases, though, it has involved an enthusiastic and dedicated band of volunteers \u2013 a select few. Now, though, we\u2019re delighted to be working with the UK\u2019s largest family history publication, Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine<\/em>, to take our project to a much wider audience \u2013 and to get them (and you!) involved in the research!<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Every year WDYTYA?Magazine <\/em>runs \u2018Transcription Tuesday\u2019: a single day, on which anyone and everyone is invited to help out nominated projects by transcribing records into an electronic format. In 2019 we\u2019re thrilled to have been invited to be one of those projects \u2013 so on 5 February you can join in with the research: more detail on that here<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Our MRC partners have digitised a volume of trade union records produced by the wonderfully-titled Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS) \u2013 a forerunner of today\u2019s RMT Union. The volume covers legal cases between 1901 and 1905 in which the ASRS had an interest \u2013 including things like compensation for accidents, or inquiries into accidents.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

We\u2019re asking for help in making the contents of the volume more readily accessible. At the moment if you wanted to know what was in it, you\u2019d need to go to the MRC in person, and search through it page by page (as there isn\u2019t an index). We\u2019re hoping that on Transcription Tuesday we can work through the whole volume and transcribe each of the 2,150 cases into an easily searchable spreadsheet.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

There\u2019s more detail here<\/a> about what the day involves and what exactly we\u2019re asking people to do (including our comprehensive guide!) \u2013 do go and have a look. The transcription itself is relatively quick and easy, and it\u2019s a great way to immerse yourself in the past.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

We\u2019ve already transcribed the first page, and it has revealed a number of stories \u2013 some we\u2019re detailing via our project Twitter feed (@RWLDproject) and some via blog posts on our website. One of these is William Mercer, a guard on a mineral train and a member of the York No. 1 branch of the ASRS. He was killed on 25 January 1901 in a mineral siding in York, knocked down by wagons. The volume shows us that the inquest was held on 28 January 1901, where Mercer\u2019s interests were represented by J Bickerdike, the branch Secretary. At the inquest it was decided that Mercer\u2019s death was accidental, a result of a misunderstanding in signalling. He left a widow and two children, who were awarded a payment of \u00a3248.17.2 (around \u00a325,500 at today\u2019s prices) in compensation. We also know from the volume that the ASRS pursued this claim with the assistance of Brumbie and Sons solicitors, at a cost of \u00a33.10.6. Mercer might otherwise have evaded the historical record, but for this volume and his unfortunate death.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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A posed accident prevention photo, taken at Doncaster in 1930. It was warning of the dangers of going between wagons – a frequent source of crush injuries. Courtesy: National Railway Museum<\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

We\u2019ve been really amazed by the support and enthusiasm we\u2019ve had for this \u2013 particularly as it\u2019s come from all sorts of people and groups, from enthusiastic individuals to huge organisations. The RMT Union has been helping out \u2013 really pleasing, as of course this volume is part of its past \u2013 and so have other players in the current industry, as well as academic, archivist and museums colleagues.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Some of the strongest support has come from family history and genealogical worlds. When we set the project up we knew that it was likely to be of great interest to them, as the data we\u2019re using was virtually unknown but full of details about people and their work \u2013 and ultimately in a great many cases, their deaths. The willingness that family historians and genealogists have shown, not just to use the data we\u2019re providing, but to help out producing more and to think critically about it, has been brilliant.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Indeed, one of the things we didn\u2019t foresee when we started was the links that we\u2019d build with these communities \u2013 and that other academics were also making similar moves. There are exciting developments afoot here, including in the next couple of weeks a preliminary discussion between all sorts of researchers about how we might better cooperate and work together \u2013 more on that in a future blog post, after the meeting!<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

For now, we\u2019d warmly welcome you to join us on February 5 for Transcription Tuesday \u2013 let\u2019s get that volume fully transcribed!<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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In this blog, Dr Mike Esbester, senior lecturer in history at Portsmouth, discusses your chance to get involved in the research project he co-leads, looking at safety and accidents on British and Irish railways at the start of the 20th century. Mike\u2019s research and teaching focus on the everyday, including ideas about mobility and accidents in modern Britain. \u00a0 One of the great aspects of the \u2018Railway Work, Life & Death\u2019 project, which I co-lead with colleagues at the National Railway Museum in York (NRM) and the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick (MRC), has been its collaborative nature. As well as working across institutions and professional boundaries […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":1318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,7,18],"tags":[403,14,76,285,335,405,469,404],"class_list":["post-1317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","category-news","category-public-history","tag-family-history","tag-history","tag-national-railway-museum","tag-research","tag-safety","tag-transcription-tuesday","tag-volunteering","tag-volunteers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/history.port.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/1-low-res-2-e1548268993843.jpg?fit=618%2C298&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p91PlX-lf","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1317"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1925,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317\/revisions\/1925"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}