Dr Laura Sangha shares details of her role in the ongoing Leverhulme Trust project, exploring the value of wills in helping us understand the material culture of early modern England. With support from the Springboard fund, this project has encouraged public engagement through active volunteering and workshop opportunities.
Amount of award: £1200
As a historian on the Leverhulme Trust project ‘The Material Culture of Wills: England 1540-1790’, my two ‘What’s in a Will?’ workshops aimed to jumpstart public engagement with the project and lay foundations for similar future activities. The Wills project is a citizen humanities project in partnership with The National Archives – that is to say, we are producing data in collaboration with the public. We have already worked with a small group of volunteers to train a Handwritten Text Recognition model that we are now using to generate 25,000 transcriptions of wills. These are then checked and corrected by a much larger number of volunteers working on the ‘Zooniverse’ platform. The PER workshops were designed to boost engagement with our research; to increase knowledge and understanding of the historic value of wills; and to take these sources to new audiences. We were keen to develop the knowledge and skills of non-academic practitioners, and to provide enjoyment and inspiration for attendees.
The two workshops each had 20 participants, one took place at The National Archives, Kew; the other at the University of Exeter. My pre-event questionnaires indicated that the attendees had quite different backgrounds – ranging from former postgraduate students to professional and amateur genealogists, as well as current staff and students in Higher Education. Whether through an interest in personal history, a desire to contribute to current research, or keenness to learn more, all expressed enthusiasm for different elements of the project. At the workshops, hands-on activities were interspersed with short talks from members of the project team explaining our research method, summarising how historians use wills, and surveying the sorts of history that they can be used to write. For instance, our project leader Professor Jane Whittle talked about gendered cultures of will making, and I discussed religious aspects. During the day we gave our attendees copies of original wills to read and discuss, using these examples to share advice, allowing people to locate and analyse wills in the future. We also previewed our ‘Zooniverse’ website, and the participants became the first people to transcribe lines from wills on the platform.
The biggest challenge I faced was designing activities that would cater to the quite varied level of knowledge and expertise in the room. I handled this by keeping sessions and activities short, leaving plenty of time for questions and providing lots of interesting snippets from our sources. Our feedback showed that participants appreciated this, so I will continue to run events this way in future.
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“I attended the fantastic ‘Using Wills in Historical Research’ workshop where I had the opportunity to learn about wills from 1540-1790.The project displayed an impressive interdisciplinary scope as the workshop was attended by academics, students and scholars from areas of History, English and Law. In addition, the team’s use of the Zooniverse platform has created an accessible form of participation by enabling volunteers from various academic and non-academic backgrounds to transcribe wills and get a glimpse into early modern material culture.” – Hannah Dow, University of Exeter English (BA) graduate
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Both the workshops were enormously successful in creating genuine dialogue between the project team and workshop participants. Discussions on the day and feedback afterwards have given me a really good sense of which aspects of wills inspired people, and which types of activities they enjoyed. In London the audience was keen to learn more about the HTR model and offered suggestions for improvement of our Zooniverse workflows and tasks. In Exeter there was particular interest in the materiality and content of wills, especially the objects (clothes, furniture, jewellery etc) mentioned and funeral arrangements. Volunteers completed many lines of transcription on both days and continued to do so afterwards – a week later we had more than 1000 classifications on Zooniverse! Lots of volunteers mentioned how addictive and satisfying it was to complete these transcriptions, which was very encouraging.
In future we want to take wills to new audiences, particularly to those with no existing knowledge of their historic and social value. The workshops were a vital first step in achieving this: we made contact with several teachers, solicitors and professional genealogists who we plan to work with in the future. We hope to achieve this by producing lesson plans, linking up with law professionals during ‘Free Wills Month’, and running talks and workshops with many genealogical societies of which our attendees are members. This will not only allow us to grow our Zooniverse volunteer community, but it will also foster a shared sense of common purpose and understanding of the critical role volunteers will play in achieving our project goals.
I’m also delighted to report that Arts & Culture Exeter selected me to host a Creative Fellow during this academic year, and we have just appointed the composer, arranger, songwriter and performer Chris Hoban to the role. Chris will work alongside Laura and the rest of the wills project team to explore and unlock creative approaches to historic wills c.1540-1790.
If you would like to volunteer for the project by transcribing wills on Zooniverse, visit the project site here.