Last week, members of our Content team were thrilled to present a panel on ‘Amplifying Stories in Digital Archive Publications’ at this year’s History and Archives in Practice conference in London (#HAP25).
Discussing the conference’s themes about history, storytelling, and practices of remembrance in archives, our Senior Curators Mary Wills and Charlie Hall and our Content Assistant Beth Potter shared their research in amplifying stories, people, and hidden voices within a range of our primary source collections.
Mary talked about amplifying enslaved and indigenous peoples’ presence in our mercantile, missionary and Caribbean trading documents, Charlie focused on how memory and remembrance emerge in the immediacy of home-front wartime and post-war settings, and Beth discussed local council archive collaboration to bring to the fore counternarratives in British imperial exhibitions.
Chaired by our Academic Liaison Manager Dr Catherine Bateson, the panel also discussed the process of archive curation and creation, working with our partner archives to select materials for digitisation, and the different approaches and interpretations that our historical sources can present.
We had a brilliant time sharing our research and different stories from BOA’s collections, and hearing from other scholars and practitioners about the work they are doing in using different archives to tell historical stories.
We wish to thank the HAP organisers at the Royal Historical Society, Institute of Historical Research, and the UK National Archives for including our panel session on the programme and for hosting such a great day!