Digital Sustainability 2024

Digital Sustainability 2024 is an initiative of the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab and the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition. Digital technology represents a significant and rapidly growing proportion of global carbon emissions. With time nearly run out to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, and climate change impacts more visible than every, it’s clear we need bold and intelligent action on multiple fronts. Digital carbon is an important piece of this puzzle. Digital technologies also have a range of environmental impacts beyond just their carbon footprint. At the same time, the digital has important contributions to make to net zero, climate risk management, and environmental sustainability. We’ll be exploring these complexities.

Key open access outputs will include:

The Cloud and the Climate: A Report — what does cloud sustainability look like in 2024
Digital Sustainability Game — an immersive storytelling and strategy game about the future of digital sustainability

Some strands include:

Collecting and sharing best practice around procuring and managing ICT systems
Identifying, investigating and curating relevant standards, certifications, and tooling, and informing development of those currently in the works
The role of games, play, storytelling and the arts in driving digital sustainability

Pop open Digital Sustainability 2024, and you’ll find three projects inside:

1) Designing the Future of Cloud Carbon Data is funded by Innovate UK and delivered with industry partner GreenPixie. This project is all about the cloud. The cloud exists in hyperscale data centres, which can deliver sustainability efficiencies that are out-of-reach for many on-premise data centres. It’s very tempting to think we should move everything to the cloud, and let AWS, Azure and Google figure out the details — and a few years ago, this was widely thought to be a good idea. But there is increasing recognition that the public cloud is not a one-size-fits-all solution. For many companies, a hybrid solution may be the way forward.

One current challenge is that tools such as AWS’ Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, Microsoft’s Sustainability Manager, and Google Cloud’s Carbon Footprint Tool, fail to accurately capture actual emissions. Complementary location-based carbon measurement tools have been developed (both proprietary and open source), but typically require a lot of dedicated technical expertise to operate. We want to explore ways of getting accurate cloud carbon data to a much wider user base.

A second major issue is supply chain. There are many businesses for whom Scope 3 makes up the majority of emissions. But it can be tricky enough to figure out your own cloud carbon emissions — how do you go about engaging suppliers about their cloud emissions? How can sustainability, IT and procurement functions best work together to drive real change? We want to hear about your experiences to date, to develop and share best practice in this area.

A third issue is the relationship between economic, environmental, and social sustainability. If you’re spending more money, you’re typically using more energy, so these often track together. But this isn’t always the case, so how do we identify those moments where price isn’t a good proxy for sustainability, and how do we address the tricky trade-offs that may emerge?

2) Designing Sustainable Digital Futures is funded by the AHRC IAA Design and AI Accelerator, and is part of Future Observatory, the Design Museum’s national research programme for the green transition. This project is broader and more entry level than the first. The digital is deeply interwoven into our everyday lives and work, but the systems we rely on remain mysterious to many of us. On this project, we’ll be exploring how the arts, storytelling and design can illuminate the complexities of digital sustainability for diverse audiences, and guide organisations toward sustainable digital futures. Designing Sustainable Digital Futures is interested in engaging all organisations interested in improving digital sustainability, no matter where you may be in your journey. Some of our priorities include:

SMEs
Creative industries
Culture and heritage organisations
Third sector

In addition to digital-themed workshops, we are also offering opportunities to host experiential workshops on the Sustainable Development Goals, to place digital sustainability within a much wider context.

3) Automating Climate Mitigation Advisory Services is funded by the AHRC IAA. The sustainability consulting industry is now in enormous demand, as companies seek to navigate the complexities of net zero and climate risk. We are seeing the rise of new approaches to third party sustainability support, including curated and facilitated toolkits, as well as experiments in automation. This project, building on the back of a previous HEIF-funded collaboration with Hampshire Cultural Trust and Greenly, will explore the relationship between clients, climate advisors, and advisory tools.

We’re working with Greenly to gain insights about the practicalities of constructing decarbonisation strategies for a diverse range of organisations. How do you go from high-level, generic evidence to on-the-ground operational changes? We’ll be conducting expert interviews, and also sharing our own expertise and experience in climate-related communication and in sustainable AI and ICT specifically.

How can you get involved in Digital Sustainability 2024? If your business or organisation is interested in improving the environmental impacts of your digital technology, feel free to reach out. Contact j.c.walton@sussex.ac.uk, or fill out this survey.

Digital Sustainability 2024 Team

Jo Lindsay Walton (Lead)
Josephine Lethbridge (Co-Lead)
Nathalie Huegler
Florence Okoye
Kinda Al Sayed
Faosiyat Tiamiyu-Tijani

What is a Research Software Engineer (RSE)?

by Elena Dennison, Programme Manager, SHL Digital.

If I had a penny for each clear answer I have been given when asking that question, I would be penniless. So having no pennies to lose, I approached our own RSE, Dr Nic Seymour-Smith and asked him to give me some examples of the types of work he gets involved with at Sussex Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Sussex.

Nic explains that the Research Software Engineer (RSE) role seeks to collaboratively combine professional software expertise with an understanding of research. In this context, to understand what an RSE can and can’t provide it is important to understand the meaning of ‘Research Software’ vs ‘Software in Research’.

‘Research Software‘ understood as source code files, algorithms, scripts, computational workflows and executables that were created during the research process or for a research purpose.
vs
‘Software in Research‘ understood as software components (e.g., operating systems, libraries, dependencies, packages, scripts, etc.) that are used for research but were not created during or with a clear research intent.
as defined by Barker et al (2022) in the “FAIR for Research Software Principles”.

This differentiation may vary between disciplines and will also vary between individual RSEs, whose backgrounds and experience are as varied as the multitude of research fields that exist in academia.

Working with the particular needs of SHL Digital as a research environment that recognises the vital role of good practice in software and data management, Nic’s RSE role will also facilitate the development of those practices with a focus on reproducibility, reusability, and accuracy of data analysis and applications created for research.

Nic can work together with researchers working within SHL Digital’s remit to develop the technological aspects of funding proposals, ensuring that adequate time, funding, and human resources are assigned to the development of software and hardware components of the project according to best development practices.

Nic can also directly lend his expertise to funded proposals, by being included as an RSE resource in a project. Nic has a broad range of experience in the development of software and hardware solutions, including for example: data analysis and visualisation; multimedia interactive digital software and artworks; interactive mechanical installations; and electronic engineering.

Can I get a penny now?

Democratising Digital Decarbonisation

This summer, the Sussex Humanities Lab, as part of our Experimental Ecologies cluster, is running a project focused on the challenges of decarbonising the digital. With a fabulous set of collaborators, including the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition, Hampshire Cultural Trust, Bloom & Wild, Greenly, and GreenPixie, we’re working capture and share some best practice in measuring and reducing carbon emissions, with some particular emphasis on digital carbon and cloud computing.

Key outputs will be:

A case study about Hampshire Cultural Trust‘s sustainability journey, emphasising challenges and opportunities distinctive to the GLAM sector
A case study about Bloom & Wild’s sustainability journey, emphasising ICT and Cloud

Decarbonisation must operate on a tight timeframe. The IPCC has established that global carbon emissions would need to peak and begin an unprecedented fall within the 2020-2025 period to have a reasonable chance of aligning with the Paris Agreement.

Across many sectors, despite ambitious net zero commitments, it remains challenging to interpret what climate transition means for day-to-day decision-making, longer-term strategy, or the interests and agendas of different stakeholders. The legal and regulatory environment is rapidly evolving, along with standards and certifications, and informal sectoral norms. Organisations’ capacity to interpret and to apply these to their own operations varies considerably, and where there are gaps, climate tech and climate consulting services are set to play a key role. It’s easy to get stuck in the phase of data collection, or trying to figure out what data to collect, and delay actual carbon reductions. Communicating climate risk and climate action with internal stakeholders is challeging too.

Unsurprisingly, we’re seeing a boom in commercially available climate-related expertise, on a variety of models. Buying in the right expertise can help clients to put evidence into practice. But there are plenty of questions around such engagements. Who can or can’t afford bespoke consulting engagements? To what extent can and should such expertise be automated and platformised? Can we reconcile tensions between a technical mindset (seeking optimal solutions) and a political mindset (making value judgments and trying to do the right thing)? How do state-of-the-art carbon analytics services fit into the broader picture of climate policy, climate justice, and the political economy of energy transition?

And, of course, what role might universities play in identifying digital decarbonisation methods and best practices, enriching these with interdisciplinary expertise, and getting them to the decision-makers who need them? How do we ensure that the legitimacy that academics can generate and confer is being deployed responsibly, within the wider ecology of decarbonisation knowledge and practice? Who is an expert on who is an expert?

In 2019, the University of Sussex joined many others in declaring a climate emergency. Democratising Digital Decarbonisation aims to balance action research with an exploratory ethos. In other words, we plan to make tangible contributions to net zero goals in the short term. At the same time, we fully expect to emerge from the project not only with a few new answers, but also with a few new questions. And we’re not just interested in producing new knowledge or new research agendas. We’re interested in knowledge exchange in the richest sense: in learning from one another; in nurturing learning within networks of collaboration, care and solidarity; and in valuing that knowledge not just wearing our professional hats on, but with our human hats too. We think this is a good approach to doing research in the middle of an emergency!

Project team:

PI: Jo Walton (j.c.walton@sussex.ac.uk)
Co-I: Josephine Lethbridge
Olivia Byrne
Alex Cline
Polina Levontin
Matthew McConkey

Funding:

HEIF
ESRC IAA (scoping: Mainstreaming Climate Transition)
GreenPixie
Greenly

What is Concept Analytics and who are we?

Concept Analytics Lab (CAL) gathers linguists, AI engineers, and historians and is aligned with Sussex Humanities Lab within the Critical Digital Humanities and Archives research cluster. The principle mission behind Concept Analytics is to understand human thinking by analysing conceptual layering in texts. We overcome the divides between humanities, AI, and data science by harnessing the power of computational linguistics without losing sight of close linguistic analysis.

Although CAL was formally set up in 2021, its existence is the culmination of research energies over the previous few years and our desire for a stable space to explore concept-related ideas with like-minded scholars. Establishing the Lab has provided us with a platform from which we showcase our research expertise to researchers and other external partners. CAL has grown and changed through 2022, during which time we have counted on a team of six researchers at a range of stages in their careers, from undergraduate to postdoctoral level. The team is led by Dr Justyna Robinson.

CAL has so far partnered with research groups within Sussex, e.g. SSRP, as well as ones further afield, e.g. Westminster Centre for Research on Ageing. We have worked closely with Archives such as Mass Observation Archive and Proceedings of the Old Bailey, as well as non-academic organisations.

What were the highlights of the past year?

Our activities in the past year centred around exploring the content of the Mass Observation Project (MOP) and their Archive of May 12 Diaries with the aim of identifying conceptual changes that happened during Covid-19. We have completed two main research projects. CAL was awarded funding through the UK-RI/HEIF/SSRP call Covid-19 to Net Zero, in collaboration with industry partner Africa New Energies, to identify the impact of Covid-19 on people’s perceptions and habits in the context of household recycling and energy usage. CAL was also commissioned by the PETRA project (Preventing Disease using Trade Agreements, funded by UKPRP/MRC) to discover key themes and perceptions the public holds towards post-Brexit UK trade agreements. Keep reading for summaries of the findings of these research projects, as well as our other achievements this year.

Household recycling with Africa New Energy (ANE)

Through this project we identified that respondents to the MOP Household Recycling 2021 directive were deeply committed to recycling, but that these feelings were coupled with doubt and cynicism in relation to the effectiveness of the current system. MOP writers pointed to a perceived lack of transparency and standardisation in recycling processes and systems. Lack of transparency and standardisation have also been identified as obstacles to recycling adherence and efficacy in more policy-based analytical surveys (Burgess et al., 2021; Zaharudin et al., 2022). Changes in recycling habits among the UK population were identified as resulting from external factors, such as Covid-19 and reduced services, as well as lack of knowledge about how and what can be recycled. This research has significantly impacted the way our grant partner ANE approach their operations in terms of gaining energy from organic waste content. The research results also led ANE to start work on gamifying the waste classification process. It aims to encourage recycling compliance by replacing the current sanction-based system with a more rewards-based system. This research shows that the CAL already has a track record of establishing commercial routes of impact for our research and we see extending the scope of this impact to be a critical next step in CAL’s research programme. Further details on the collaboration with ANE can be found in this blog post.

We are seeking further HEIF funding to expand on the work already done with the Household Recycling directive to maximise policy impact by processing the handwritten answers and also processing the 2022 12 May Diaries for insight into the impact of the current energy crisis on respondents’ behaviour and attitudes to energy. As part of this project we would hold an exhibition in which we would invite various stakeholders including policy makers to showcase our work.

MOP UK Trade Deals

We were commissioned by the PETRA project’s lead Prof. Paul Kingston from the University of Chester to perform a conceptual linguistic analysis of the MOP UK Trade Deals directive. We used our approach to identify hidden patterns and trends in the answers to the directive questions. The conceptual analysis allows us to combine quantitative with qualitative methods and identify otherwise unperceived patterns. The main themes that arose were related to the perceived quality of trade deals and concerns about animal and ethical standards. We also performed an analysis linked to people’s knowledge, belief and desires. The results of the analysis will inform policy makers in their decisions regarding trade deals. Additionally this piece of work has attracted some interest from public health bodies with whom we are preparing a potential grant for future research.

Papers and presentations

In 2022 Justyna Robinson and Julie Weeds both presented the work they did within the context of the Old Bailey archives and have had their paper on that work published in the Transactions of Philological Society. In this paper they describe a novel approach to analysing texts, in which computational tools turn traditional texts into a corpus of syntactically-related concepts. Justyna Robinson and Rhys Sandow also have authored a paper forthcoming in 2023, ‘Diaries of regulation: Mass Observing the first Covid-19 lockdown’. This research will be presented at Mass Observation’s 85th Anniversary Festival, Mass Observation Archive, The Keep, 23^rd April 2023.

Website

As part of the SSRP/HEIF funding we received earlier this year we have also developed a website, which can be found at conceptanalytics.org.uk, where we also post blogs with news pieces and short research insights.

Embedding Sustainability in the Curriculum

Presenting the Media Arts and Humanities Sustainability Educator Toolkit:

Or if you prefer, here is the Google doc (feel free to leave comments).

This toolkit is aimed at supporting educators (at Sussex and beyond) to build themes, concepts and practices related to sustainability into our teaching. It’s a grab-bag of inspirations, provocations, and helpful signposts.

It covers:

Sustainable Development Goals
Planetary boundaries
Climate change and climate justice
Ecocentrism
Indigenous knowledges
Degrowth and postgrowth

There is a focus on media, arts and humanities, and some focus on the University of Sussex. But we hope it will be useful much more widely.

This toolkit is complemented by a crowdsourced living document of links and resources. We have been inspired by the commitment to decolonising the curriculum in the past few years. Now it is time to embed sustainability – and acknowledge the deep relationship between the two.

The toolkit is published under a CC license.

Other related resources:

UCU’s continued professional development programme includes workshops on topics like Decarbonise and Decolonise and Embedding climate education in the curriculum.
Faculty for a Future offers a growing range of resources for academics around sustainability and social and ecological justice.
Pathways to Sustainability is a free online course from the STEPS Centre.

Storytelling and play for climate futures

By Jo Lindsay Walton

One of the most interesting projects I’ve been part of this year is the climate futures roleplaying game Kampala Yénkya. With the support of the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme, I’ve been lucky enough to work alongside Dilman Dila and Maurice Ssebisubi (Uganda), Polina Levontin and Jana Kleineberg (UK), Bright Nkrumah (Germany / South Africa), and assorted playtesters and reviewers, to create innovative educational materials around climate adaptation, localised for Uganda.

UNESCO highlight the importance of futures literacy to a just climate transition:

Democratizing the origins of people’s images of the future opens up new horizons in much the same way that establishing universal reading and writing changes human societies. This is an example of what can be called a ‘change in the conditions of change.’

In the Global North, games and science fiction have longstanding links with futures research, and more recently have developed a strong connection with climate futures specifically (something we’ll be exploring in a special issue of Vector in spring 2023). By contrast, African speculative cultures are underutilised and under-theorised in the context of adaptation to and mitigation of climate change.

The project’s key deliverable was a tabletop roleplaying game, Kampala Yénkya (the title roughly translates to ‘Kampala of Tomorrow’). The game involves mapmaking and collaborative storytelling, and seeks to empower players to imagine the future of Kampala in many different ways. It is available to download here, under a Creative Commons license.

This is the first edition (‘Oracle’ edition), designed to be played with fairly minimal materials: a copy of the rules, an ordinary deck of playing cards (or two), some tokens (e.g. matchsticks), and blank paper and pen for drawing a map.

Science fiction writer Dilman Dila provided the initial inspiration and wrote a substantial portion of the game materials, as well as a supplementary collection of short stories. The game design was informed by the Applied Hope: Utopias & Solarpunk games jam which I co-organised last year, supported by SHL. Kampala Yénkya evolved through several rounds of playtesting in four of Kampala’s secondary schools. Maurice Ssebisubi, an environmental scientist and an educator, coordinated the games that involved nearly two hundred students, ensuring that the game is responsive to local climate information needs while also being fun and inspiring to play.

The bulk of the funding was made available from the SSRP’s Fund #6 to support the work of a team of Ugandan and UK academics, educators, and artists, to develop and test innovative climate action education materials for use in Uganda. SHL provided support in-kind in the form of me, and also a little extra funding for translation. All the core team members also volunteered additional time on the project. Special thanks also to Peter Newell and Michael Jonik for their help early on.

Outputs

Kampala Yénkya: Oracle Edition is now available as an open beta. This version of the game can be played with easily sourced materials (matchsticks, playing cards, pen and paper). The oracle edition is published in English and Luganda. bit.ly/ImagineAlternatives

Kampala Yénkya: Deluxe Edition is currently is in its playtesting / graphic design phase (design by Jana Kleineberg). Game packs will be delivered to 20 further Ugandan schools in late 2022 / early 2023. Each game pack contains:

Game materials and instructions — custom designed cards and ‘story stones’ for playing Kampala Yénkya. With the help of narrative prompts, players imagine Kampala in 2060, while also getting quizzed on their climate knowledge.
Inspiration deck — extra storytelling and worldbuilding ideas written by Dilman Dila, with contributions by Polina Levontin.
Further information — for players who want a more in-depth exploration of themes raised within the game.

Ugandan SF writer Dilman Dila has written a collection of short stories (working title Kampala Yénkya: Stories) set in a future Uganda, which will be published by Ping Press in 2023, with an introduction by Wole Talabi. Dila’s five interlinked tales were developed in dialogue with climate experts across Uganda and the UK. The collection also includes Q&A to enrich its value in educational settings.

Activities

Next Steps

The project wrapped up officially at the end of July, but the momentum has continued. Maurice Ssebisubi is leading on the creation of a network of environmental clubs across schools in Uganda. This work has been supported through our project, with the climate quiz and game playtesting used as activities to pilot the clubs.

We are exploring a potential workshop around the game at African Futures 2023 (Cologne).

The project will also be the central case study in a chapter on climate risk education for Communicating Climate Risk: 3rd Edition (SHL, 2023), from the Sussex Humanities Lab and the Institute of Development Studies PASTRES project.

All game materials are made available under a permissive Creative Commons licence, to encourage sharing and adaptation. We have received expressions of interest in localising the game for other countries (South Africa, Nigeria), and will be exploring ways to support this work in the future.

Tabletop roleplaying (TTRPG) is popular all over the world, including many countries in the Global South, for both entertainment and education. But as far as we’ve been able to discover, it doesn’t yet appear very prevalent in Africa. We would be interested in hearing from TTRPG players, designers, writers, or societies / groups from the continent.

Applied Hope Game Jam

The Applied Hope: Solarpunk & Utopias Game Jam was an open games jam run in summer 2021, inviting game designers to create all manner of things related to envisioning positive futures. Entries were mostly storytelling and tabletop roleplaying games, although we also got prototype video games, zines, a Twitter bot, and more.

After poring through almost sixty submissions, some prizes have just been awarded:

1) Best RPG Under Five Pages: subconscious_Routine by poorstudents

2) Best Solarpunk DIY Game: Scraps by Cezar Capacle

3) The Lustrous Effervescing Fontanelle of Luminous Mutable Futures Award: It’s About the Yearning by Lonely Cryptid Media

4) Mx Congeniality: Moon Elves by Maik

5) The Applied Hope Fruiting Bodies Award: Roots & Flowers by The Gift of Gabes

6) The Best Adaptation Award: The Transition Year by Affinity Games

7) Best Game About Something Pretty Specific: Marvelous Mutations & Merry Musicians! by Wendi Yu

Special Prize: Big Buzz Award: The Nurture by hannah j. gray

Some remarks on the winners can be found here.

Digital forensics methods in humanities research

Last year SHL was lucky enough to have the brilliant and lovely Thorston Ries working with us on his Horizon 2020-funded DFitHH project, undertaken with the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme. Thorston’s project …

… used three born-digital archives as case studies: the personal digital archives of novelist, playwright and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, technology journalist Glyn Moody, and the Mass Observation Project Archive. “The work with the archives resulted in awareness and advice for future improvement of archival workflows, tools and standards,” says Ries.

Full write-up here.

Thorston’s presence in SHL was enough to convert a number of us into digital forensics NERDs (Nothing’s Ever Reaaallllyyy Deleted).

And we’re off!

Sussex’s Dr Nicola Stylianou reflects on the launch of Making African Connections.

Suchi Chatterjee (researcher, Brighton and Hove Black History) and Scobie Lekhuthile (curator, Khama III Memorial Museum) discussing the project.

Last week was the first time that everybody working on the Making African Connections project was in the same room together. This was a very exciting moment for us and was no small feat: people travelled from Namibia, Botswana, Sudan and all across the UK to attend our first project workshop. We began by discussing the project together and then broke into three groups to discuss the three museum collections of African objects that are now in Kent and Sussex.

The first working group was discussing a collection of Batswana artefacts donated to Brighton museum by Revd Willoughby, a missionary. Staff at the museum will be working with researcher Winani Thebele (Botswana National Museums) and curator Scobie Lekhuthile (Khama III Memorial Museum) as well Tshepo Skwambane (DCES) and Suchi Chatterjee and Bert Williams (Brighton and Hove Black History). The second case study focuses on a large collection of objects from South West Angola that are held at the Powell-Cotton Museum and were acquired in the 1930s. The objects are mainly Kwanyama and this part of the project has, as its advisor, an expert in Kwanyama history, Napandulwe Shiweda (University of Namibia). Finally, the project will consider Sudanese objects held at the Royal Engineers Museum. Research for this part of the project is being conducted by Fergus Nicoll, Reem al Hilou (Shams AlAseel Charitable Initiative) and Osman Nusairi (intellectual).

The aim of the workshop was to decide together what the priorities for the project were. We will begin digitising objects for our online archive in April so we need to know which objects we want to work on first as some of the collections are very large. It will only be possible to create online records for a selection of objects.

BOT_20190212_3-1024x768 — Viewing the objects in the store room

REMLA_20190208_1-1-1024x683 — Viewing galleries at the Royal Engineers Museum

Before the workshop on Wednesday we had arranged for all the participants to visit the relevant galleries and see objects in storage. This had lead to some interesting and difficult conversations that we were able to build on during the workshop. Perhaps the clearest thing to come out of the meeting was the sheer amount of work to be done to fully research these collections and to understand their potential to connect to audiences and each other.

This post originally appeared on the Making African Connections project blog on 25 February 2019. Making African Connections is an AHRC-funded project.

Mending Dame Durrants’ Shoes

This week Louise Falcini gave us an update on the AHRC-funded project The Poor Law: Small Bills and Petty Finance 1700-1834.

The Old Poor Law in England and Wales, administered by the local parish, dispensed benefits to paupers providing a uniquely comprehensive, pre-modern system of relief. The law remained in force until 1834, and provided goods and services to keep the poor alive. Each parish provided food, clothes, housing and medical care. This project will investigate the experiences of people across the social spectrum whose lives were touched by the Old Poor Law, whether as paupers or as poor-law employees or suppliers.

The project seeks to enrich our understanding of the many lives touched by the Old Poor Law. This means paupers, but it also means workhouse mistresses and other administrators, midwives, tailors, cobblers, butchers, bakers, and many others. Intricate everyday social and economic networks sprung up around the Poor Law, about which we still know very little.

To fill these gaps to bursting, the project draws on a previously neglected class of sources: thousands upon thousands of slips of paper archived in Cumbria, Staffordshire and East Sussex, often tightly folded or rolled, of varying degrees of legibility, and all in the perplexing loops and waves of an eighteenth century hand …

Overseer note

These Overseers’ vouchers – similar to receipts – record the supply of food, clothes, healthcare, and other goods and services. Glimpse by glimpse, cross-reference by cross-reference, these fine-grained fragments glom together, revealing ever larger and more refined images of forgotten lives. Who was working at which dates? How did procurement and price fluctuate? What scale of income was possible for the suppliers the parish employed? What goods were stocked? Who knew whom, and when? Who had what? What broke or wore out when? As well as the digital database itself, the project will generate a dictionary of partial biographies, collaboratively authored by professional academics and volunteer researchers.

Louise took us through the data capture tool used by volunteer researchers. A potentially intimidating fifty-nine fields subtend the user-friendly front-end. The tool is equipped with several useful features. For example, it is possible to work remotely. The researcher has the option to “pin” the content of a field from one record to the next. The database automatically saves every iteration of each record. The controlled vocabulary is hopefully flexible enough to helpfully accommodate any anomalies. It’s also relatively easy to flag up records for conservation assessment or transcription assistance, or to go back and edit records. Right now they’re working on implementing automated catalogue entry creation, drawing on the Calm archive management system.

Personally, one of the things I find exciting about the project is how it engages both with the history of work and with the future of work. Part of its core mission is to illuminate institutions of disciplinarity, entrepreneurship, and precarity in eighteenth and early nineteenth century England. At the same time the project also involves, at its heart, questions about how we work in the twenty-first century.

Just take that pinning function, which means that researchers can avoid re-transcribing the same text if it’s repeated over a series of records. It almost feels inadequate to frame this as a “useful feature,” with all those overtones of efficiency and productivity! I’m not one of those people who can really geek out over user experience design. But most of us can relate to the experience of sustained labour in slightly the wrong conditions or using slightly the wrong tools. Most of us intuit that the moments of waste woven into such labour can’t really be expressed just in economic terms. And I’m pretty sure the moments of frustration woven into such labour can’t be expressed in purely psychological terms either. Those moments might perhaps be articulated in the language of metaethics and aesthetics? – or perhaps they need their very own (as it were) controlled vocabulary. But whatever they are, I think they manifest more clearly in voluntary labour, where it is less easy to let out that resigned sigh and think, “Whatever, work sucks. Come on Friday.”

I don’t have any first-hand experience of working with this particular data capture tool. But from the outside, the design certainly appears broadly worker-centric. I think digital work interfaces, especially those inviting various kinds of voluntary labour, can be useful sites for thinking more widely about how to challenge a productivity-centric division of labour with a worker-centric design of labour. At the same time, I guess there are also distinctive dangers to doing that kind of thinking in that kind of context. I wouldn’t be surprised if the digital humanities’ love of innovation, however reflexive and critical it is, tempts us to downplay the importance of the minute particularity of every worker’s experience, and the ways in which working practices can be made more hospitable and responsive to that particularity. (Demos before demos, that’s my demand).

I asked Louise what she thought motivated the volunteer researchers. Not that I was surprised – if something is worth doing there are people willing to do it, given the opportunity! – but I wondered what drew these particular people to this particular work? In the case of these parishes, it helps that there are good existing sources into which the voucher data can be integrated, meaning that individual stories are coming to life especially rapidly and richly-resolved. Beyond this? Obviously, the motives were various. And obviously, once a research community was established, it has the potential to become a motivating energy in itself. But Louise also reckoned that curiosity about these histories – about themes of class, poor relief and the prehistory of welfare, social and economic justice, and of course about work – played a huge role in establishing it in the first place.

Blake wrote in Milton about “a moment in each Day that Satan cannot find / Nor can his Watch Fiends find it.” I bet there is a moment within every rote task that those Watch Fields have definitely stuck there on purpose. It’s that ungainly, draining, inimitable moment that can swell with every iteration till it somehow comes to dominate the task’s entire temporality. It is politically commendable to insist that these moments persist in any task designed fait accompli from a distance, by people who will never have to complete that task more than once or twice … no matter how noble or comradely their intentions. But even if we should be careful about any dogmatic redesign of labour, I think we should at least be exploring how to redesign the redesign of labour. Karl Marx wrote in his magnum opus The Wit and Wisdom of Karl Marx that, unlike some of his utopian contemporaries, he was not interested in writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future. In some translations, not recipes but receipts. It actually is definitely the future now. And some of us are hungry.

JLW

The Poor Law: Small Bills and Petty Finance 1700-1834 is an AHRC-funded project.

PI: Alannah Tomkins (Keele)
Co-I: Tim Hitchcock (Sussex)
Research Fellow: Louise Falcini (Sussex)
Research Associate: Peter Collinge (Keele)