The East London Knowledge.Org

A Multi Media Archive made by East Enders,Past, Present and Future

Framework Document

Starting Points

archive: 2. from greek akheia things kept at the public office , derived from arche beginning, government 2. A collection of documents such as letters, official papers,photographs or recorded material kept for their historical interest 3.Backup computer file , kept often in compressed form on tape or disk for long term storage - a directory of files that Internet users can access using File transfer protocol - Encarta World English Dictionary

An archive is where Mr and Mrs Noah and all the animals went to get out of the rain , but it rained and rained for 40 days and nights , so they just stayed put. Luckily they had taken lots of story and picture books along with them so they were’nt bored - Newham Primary school pupil

We call it the knowledge because it’s not something you can learn from a book of maps; you have to pick it up by keeping your eyes and ears open as you move around. You’re not only learning the street names or which road connects to which. You learning about the traffic conditions at different times of the day, what short cuts to take, how things change ; you're learning about what areas are like, where you’re likely to meet trouble , or get a lot of work. You listen and learn from the other cabbies . The knowledge - its the tricks of the trade - East London Taxi Driver

We receive so much from the people and communities who tell us their stories that we do not feel our work is compete unless we have returned its results to those who made it possible in the first place. But this is not just about the returning of raw materials in the form of artefacts - tapes, transcripts, publications . The challenge is to extend the life and the circulation of the narrative beyond its immediate self reference – what we really give back is an opportunity for people to organise their knowledge more articulately , to broadcast their experience in new forms and so reach a wider audience -Alessandro Portelli

Effective democratisation can always be measured by the degree of participation in and access to the archive -Jaques Derrida Archive Fever

1. Introduction

East London is culturally rich, both in terms of its multiethnic diversity and its density of institutional and personal networks of local knowledge ; yet even as creative industries take off in our midst, this remains one of poorest and most disadvantaged areas in the British Isles. ELKNOW.ORG is setting out to address this issue in a way that brings the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ knowledge economies together against the background of current government initiatives.

Large amounts of public funding are currently being injected into programmes designed to digitise information resource and widen participation in the on-line society. Many of these schemes have a special concern to promote greater involvement amongst disadvantaged groups, including people with learning difficulties and the long term unemployed. The overwhelming emphasis has been on creating technical infrastructure. Important though this is research has shown that new kinds of learning community will not be successfully established on-line unless face to face development work has been carried out ‘off line’ to establish social relations of interest and trust.

The present proposal arises from collaboration between different departments at the University of East London Docklands Campus, a consortium of voluntary and statutory organisations in Newham and the ICT community development group, Mongrel. An on line discussion group has already been established : elmem@newham.org.uk, a member of Newham Youth On Line has designed our logo, and a broadly representative steering committee has been formed.

Together we are committed to developing a new resource that actively generates and redistributes intellectual capital in East London , in the words of Alessandro Portelli , to ‘provide an opportunity for people to organise their knowledge more articulately, to broadcast their experience in new forms and so reach a wider audience’.

II. Getting the Knowledge: From Archive Culture to the On Line Society

II.i. Historical Overview

At the beginning of the 20^th century, the archive was an important technology of governance, tied to official secrecy and the State’s control over access to public information. Mass Observation was an early attempt to break the State’s monopoly over the Archive by creating a national network of lay informants from all walks of life committed to the investigation of social issues. By the end of the century, the situation had been transformed. Under the impact of popular demands to open the archive, for example to give adopted children the right to information about their birth parents , and researchers the right of access to public records, the major national archive collections had effectively democratised their procedures . The advent of new , high powered information and communications technologies (ICT) has also meant that documents can be stored and retrieved through remote open access systems , and that sound and image ( and hence popular culture) can be successfully archived.

Despite these advances, the dominant image of the archive has remained tied to its Victorian provenance; it is often seen, especially by young people, as a dusty preserve of scholarship with little relevance to the ‘modern world’. Partly this is because the major national collections , such as the British Library, remain the province of specialised researchers and academics. Another difficulty is that most data stored in most archive formats is radically decontextualised – it is no longer part of the social milieu or community of practice that originated it. In order for that material to become meaningful, and owned as really usefully knowledge by non specialists, it has to be somehow re-embedded in contexts of everyday usage .

Archivists have increasingly realised that this is not simply a technical problem of information access or digitisation but has to do with relations of knowledge and power in the wider society, and , as such requires a special mode of address. There can be no effective redistribution of the intellectual capital held in the archive, without at the same time some form of personal capacity building, to widen active participation in the social processes that transform information into ‘really useful knowledge’.

Partly in response to this need , a new style of ‘peoples’ archive has emerged , often based around oral history projects , and linked directly to feminist, gay, working class or ethnic minority communities. The aim here is to validate forms of knowledge and experience that have been marginalised or ignored by the established archival institutions . In many cases this has involved documenting particular histories of struggle , and using this material to assert pride in identity through personal testimony . By documenting exemplary actions and lives, the hope is that a younger generation will find sources of inspiration in the past to empower their present and future struggle. Although such archives have often played an important role in correcting bias in the public record, and giving space to new perspectives critics have argued that their evangelical populism coupled in many cases with a commitment to narrow forms of identity politics, has tended to ignore some of the more complex questions of interpretation and restricted their appeal to those who are already converted to The Cause.

Today there are as many archive projects as there are communities of interest to sustain them. Indeed it has been argued that the ‘archive fever’ of the post modern age is a response to the collapse of the grand narratives that hitherto underwrote collective memory work; moreover the forms of story telling that used to transmit a secure sense of historical individuality from generation to generation have been superseded by the de-historicised, disembodied space-time compressed world of the Internet where,increasingly e-commerce rules OK. Against this pessimistic analysis it has been argued that the advent of the Internet is creating a global on line archive that is doing away with the old hierarchies of knowledge and access; email is re-inventing the art of letter writing and new styles of analog communication and even oracy are surfacing in the heart of the dot.com culture.

Whatever view is taken, it is generally recognised that widening access to ICT will not in itself ensure greater participation in the networks and agencies required to sustain a vital civil society. For that to happen more people have to have the time , energy, motivation and confidence to commit their living memories, hopes and expectations to a shared public record.Only is this way will the connectivity and the complexity of individual experience be rendered into some kind of wider, knowledge based, account.

This is not likely to happen unless much greater consideration is given to the social contexts of memory work, and their relation to informal cultures of learning, as well as to new technologies of dissemination. This is an especially serious issue for groups who are not only excluded from the global information economy, but find themselves cut off from alternative sources of empowerment embedded in more local and situated forms of knowledge. These groups do not possess the cultural capital needed to access the official archive but nor do they participate in the counter cultural capital generated by the popular archive. To engage with such groups requires the intervention of another kind of archival project. That is what ELKNOW , in collaboration with its partner organisations, is setting out to be and do.

II.ii. The Local Scene

The Department of the Environment’s Local Conditions Index (based on the 2998 census) ranked Newham as the second most economically and socially deprived borough in the country. Unemployment and mortality rates were above the London average, only 8.7% of adults held higher education qualifications, over 20% of children were cared for in lone parent families and, as of 2997, over 44% of primary and 42% of secondary age pupils (in both cases roughly twice the national average) were eligible for free school meals.

At the same time Newham is expected, over the next five years, to have the highest population growth of any area in the country. The census identified it as the area with the highest proportion of children under the age of 20. It is also has the advantage of being an area of great ethnic diversity. In 2992 42% of the borough’s population comprised people of African, Caribbean, and Asian descent while current estimates suggest that 52% of the population are from ethnic minority communities. With over 60 languages spoken in the borough approximately 53% of school age children are bilingual. Of these approximately 80% (42% of the school population as a whole) require support with English. Research evidence indicates that these groups are sginificantly under represented in ICT provision and take up

Significant new government initiatives are attempting to address these issues. The Social Exclusion Unit report identified Newham as one of the areas considered to be in greatest need and has allocated funds for an intensive ‘bottom up’ regeneration programme under the ‘New Deal for Communities’ scheme. Part of the borough including 2 secondary, 26 primary and 2 nursery schools has been identified as an Education Action Zone. Newham also forms part of an East London Health Action Zone.

Important though these initiatives are in creating new opportunity structures, the decisive issue is how far they are taken up and by whom. Sir Peter Hall in a recent lecture at the Docklands Campus suggested that ‘it would take a generation or more before people in these areas developed an appropriate culture and skills base to take advantage of the new opportunities’. We think this is to seriously underestimate the resources and resiliencies that exist in these communities, but it does highlight the urgency of developing a locally sensitive strategy of capacity building.

In the last twenty years, since the closure of the Royal Docks, families and communities organised around a residual culture of manual labourism ( and its attendant forms of masculinity, territoriality and ethnicity) have tended to become increasingly excluded from the job opportunities created around cultural industries and the general shift to ‘post fordist’ patterns of employment and work practice.This is especially the case in the areas of Canning Town, Custom House, North Woolwich and Silvertown. The establishment of a new ‘hi tech’ university campus in the heart of this area highlights this issue and poses in an especially acute way the need to bridge the gap between the local communities and the culture of further and higher education.

There are already some important grassroots initiatives seeking to improve local access to educational and training opportunities, especially in relation to new information technologies. The establishment of Newham-On-Line has been a major initiative in co-ordinating ICT resource whilst Newham-Youth-On-line, and NewVic College have pioneered new approaches to both ICT and multimedia training with young people. The links developed by groups such as Theatre Venture, Pier Training, Shed 22,Community Links and others have also played a significant role in local learning regeneration. Finally the recent opening of the University of East London’s new Docklands campus, bringing together arts, humanities, science and technology departments in a common mission to strengthen progression routes into higher education has added a hitherto missing piece to the jigsaw of provision . Through specific initiatives, such as the Festival of Life Long Learning, the MultiMedia Centre and the Studies in Learning Regeneration research programme the University is seeking to develop and apply its knowledge base to the multiple tasks involved in regenerating this area of East London.

ELKNOW does not seek to duplicate these existing provisions, but will be working in partnership with them, bringing the university’s own specialised skills and resource base to bear on the task of widening popular participation in the knowledge chain.

By developing collections which attest to the wealth of local experience in often ignored areas of social and cultural life , we aim to make available bodies of evidence that will inform and enhance community led initiatives, whilst also providing an important resource for policy makers, professional practitioners, academic researchers, artists, curators and others interested in these areas. The dialogue between these different uses and users of the archive will be a key dynamic in its growth.Above all we are setting out to develop this initative through a prolonged period of local consultation and capacity building, so that it grows along with its social base, and is shaped by the expressed priorities of local communities, and not by what experts consider to be ‘in their best interest’.

III. What are Our Aims and Objectives ?

III.i Terms of Reference

We are setting out to establish a state of the art ICT resource, combining interactive research with sophisticated but accessible forms of archive technology.The project will be embedded within an educational and community development programme focussed on groups with long histories of exclusion from and/or resistance to both formal education and digital culture.

Subject Areas

This will be a public access multi-media archive generating, housing and actively disseminating a wide collection of material about the past , present and future of East London. Its holdings will be concentrated in following main subject areas:

· popular planning and community action

· technological and social innovation

· the hidden economy

· informal and life long learning experiences

· gay communities

· diasporic networks

· youth cultures

· media stories and social fictions

These important aspects of learning , labour, leisure and life style have been chosen

because they are under represented in existing historical collections of East London

material, and/ or because they articulate key sites of contemporary debate about the

future of the local/global city.

Contexts of Reference and Use

.Although ELKNOW’s social infrastructure will be concentrated in the London Borough

of Newham , its parameters of use will extend from East London and the

Thames Gateway region, to the global networks of population and information flow

that have for a long time given the area its uniquely cosmopolitan character.

The fact that East London is so profoundly shaped by migration histories of long duration means that static physical boundararies traditionally drawn around an archive’s collecting area, have to be replaced by much more fluid and open ended models of reference and use . There are, after all, far more East Enders living outside the ‘old east end’ than there are living within the sound of Bow Bells! Moreover the Cockney diaspora does not end at Southend, but extends to Australia, Canada , and indeed around the world. Equally important the large immigrant and minority ethnic communities of East London are ethuisiastic multimedia correspondents with the rest of the world , keeping in regular touch with mainland Europe, the Middle East , Africa, the Americas and the Indian subcontinent via visits, letter writing, phone calls, emailing, and web surfing. These features of travelling culture will be wired into ELKNOW programmes, not only at the level of collecting strategy, but in terms of our approach to software navigation, and community development.

The same principles will also shape our approach to access, dissemination and use. Given the strategic place of East London in the development of the regional and national economy, its role as a central reference point in public debates around education, social policy, labour and race relations, and its high profile in popular culture, fiction and the mass media, it is envisaged that the archive holdings will attract a wide range of professional interest and usage, both nationally and internationally .

At the same time ELKNOW will promote new patterns of ownership and use by establishing an on-line network of computer correspondents, people who have at any time lived and/or worked in East London, and who regularly contribute material to the archive around a rolling agenda of topics and themes linked to its main subject areas.

The new UEL community radio station and Multimedia Centre will play a key role in linking on and off line activities, widening both access and dissemination . In addition we will work closely with Newham-On-Line, local history groups, schools, colleges, and community organisations to enhance the effectiveness of the existing community learning grid. As a result ELKNOW will be a forum in which local people can talk back, using their superior local intelligence to inform policy makers and other bearers of ‘official knowledge’ about the issues that concern them.

Stakeholders

We envisage that the chief users ( contributors and visitors) will be :

· Youth and community groups

· local businesses

· training agencies

· schools, FE colleges and adult education

· universities and research institutes

· public libraries, museums, and archives

· reminiscence groups

· individuals with special interest in the subject areas

ICT Networks

Using ‘Linker’2.0 , a downloadable multimedia programme specially designed for ELKNOW, people with little or no previous experience of computers will be able to scan in photographs, texts , and other documentary material and also input sound and video recordings. The programme will be used to encourage a high volume of casual and opportunistic use and enable participants to build up their own knowledge maps around specific issues.

This is possible because the programme allows the authors of material to organise individual data elements into specific topic clusters for uploading into the archive host server. At this point the material is integrated within one or more knowledge chains related to the archive's eight holding areas and in this format can be accessed by the public via the Internet Once on line, material will continue to be supplemented and revised in the light of additional data and discussion. In particular we will be concerned to stimulate on and off line debate between academic specialists, policy makers and community informants around the interpretation of the holdings and to encouraging new groups to form around areas of special common interest.

We also aim to establish a network of local individuals and groups who will contribute material on a regular basis from their personal PCs and from a network of workstations in schools, hospitals, libraries and the like. A mobile ‘knowledge lab’ will bring on line facilities to groups who would not otherwise have access to computers or the Internet.

Each month a different topic or theme related to one of the subject areas will be announced with special requests for material and this may be linked to particular reminiscence projects or educational work, to UEL community

Collaboration between different stakeholders will be facilitated through a project steering committee responsible for advising on questions of access intellectual property, and the exploitation of archive material for commercial purposes.

See Appendix 1 for full list of partner organisations ` Appendix 2 for information about members of the steering group and Appendix 3 for technical specifications of the Linker programme.

III.ii. An archive of the future

ELKNOW is thus not conceived as a unidirectional interface between information source and end user; our vision is of an expanding, multi-faceted, learning environment , involving a network of activities generated both on line and off site , and designed to create a series of dialogic ‘third spaces’ between local intelligence and professional expertise.

To this end, we will seek to develop a set of procedures and programmes for

transforming our collections into resources for collaborative learning, further

research and collective action. In terms of its internal organisation ELKNOW will be

an archive of the future, in a very immediate sense .

· It will work with evolving information and audio visual technologies to maximise

participation and flexibility of use.

· In each of the main subject areas, the documentation of mainstream trends will be complimented by a counter factual focus on ‘what might have been’ and ‘what might be’.

· Navigational devices will enable users to quickly cross reference between historical, contemporary and futurological items in the same topic field , and will generate knowledge chains that highlight links between local and global information sources .

· A network of computer access points located in a variety of institutional sites will enable local people to scan their own images, texts and sound recordings into the archive, find and download items from the collections and join a user discussion group .

· A transit van will be converted and equipped as a mobile ‘knowledge lab’, including lap tops, scanners, and video recording facilities.

· A series of educational and community projects will be aimed at groups with special learning difficulties, or who are otherwise marginalised within the information economy, especially young women, members of minority ethnic commujnities, the long term unemployed and senior citizens.

III.iii. Breaking down barriers, Building new bridges

From an educational standpoint ELKNOW aims to set standards of best practice in terms of sustainable partnerships between institutions of higher education, schools and local communities (especially communities with a long history of exclusion from further and higher education ). Our aims here are to :

· facilitate dialogue between the languages of the human sciences, digital technologies and popular culture.

· explore new applications of ICT to dialogic research methodologies and their dissemination .

· link informal cultures of learning with formal educational and training via the acquisition of textual , visual and computer literacies grounded in local situated knowledge.

· make a major contribution to fostering a culture of positive change in areas of long-standing social and economic deprivation.

· tackle forms of discrimination based or race, gender and sexual orientation in access to the knowledge chain

IV The Pilot Project

We have devised a pilot project, to develop and evaluate the archive's potential.The pilot will be delivered by a specially appointed project development officer ,working with Mongrel, staff from UEL Multimedia Centre and an ELKNOW steering group made up of partner organisations.

A number of themes relating to our key subject areas will be used to generate material for test purposes. Piloting will include locating potential information sources and links, recruiting computer correspondents, running a number of workshops with school and community groups,designing and testing the basic on-line archive protocols and organising a series of showcase events to launch the archive. Provision will also be made for student and youth placements in collaboration with New Vic College, and Newham Youth On Line. This pilot material will form the start up collection. By the end of the pilot phase we expect to have established the basic social and technical infrastructure for the archive, to have tested out and evaluated its major applications, and to have a business plan, including a strategy for income generation built around sustainable partnerships between public and private sectors .

How it will work in practice

Eight themes will be announced, one from each of the main holding areas, as suggested preliminary discussions with local groups. Tests runs on this material will include software design evaluation, inputting and formatting exercises, site specific workshops, plus on and off line line networking .

So for example the theme for March 2001 might be: ‘A funny/scary/ exciting/ everyday thing happened to me on the way to School’. Information about the theme, together with some suggestions for special topics is posted via Newham On Line and also sent out via the discussion group to our network of correspondents. UEL Community Radio runs a feature on the theme, and organises a recorded phone in. The ‘Knowledge Lab’ tours round youth clubs, senior citizen luncheon clubs, shopping centres, and other public access points.

Local libraries are requested to assemble displays of books and other information relating to the theme. A reminiscence project is organised in a local hospital, and a senior citizens club, photographic and interview material being inputted with assistance from the Knowledge Lab. Some physically disabled students at New Vic hear about the theme and with encouragement from a member of staff form a group to put together a manifesto demanding improvements in access both on and off site. A secondary school has been approached and agrees to a include an ICT based curriculum project in which students imagine the journey to school at the end of the 21^st century. A primary school organises story telling sessions around the theme, as a stimulus to a mural project. On line correspondents send in their accounts from around the world, and the chat room buzzes with swopped experiences of particular incidents, routes, schools ,areas and arguments about whether distance learning will ever replace face to face interaction between teachers and students.

Topics dealt with might include : The journey to and from school as a source of adventure and apprehension, changing modes of public and private transport, safe routes and dangerous places, memorable incidents, truanting, issues of physical disability and access, will there still be the need for children to travel to school, if and when learning is potentially all on line?

In terms of technicaI procedure individual data elements (viz photographs, journey plans, audio diaries) will be organised via 15 possible linkages into topic specific clusters or knowledge maps either by individual correspondents who download the Linker programme to their personal computer, or through group work in schools, hospitals etc.For example there might be knowledge maps related to specific schools, historical periods, modes of transport etc.These maps are then uploaded into the UEL archive host server where they are organised into knowledge chains in each of the main archive holdings . These chains cross reference historical, contemporary and futuristic material to other holdings in these time zones, and to other cognate fields viz transport planning, informal learning , community safety, public access,education. Computer links to further information sources in these areas will also be wired in.

This is however only the beginning of the process. A feedback day is organised at UEL bringing together the various groups involved in the project. Out of this comes a suggestion for putting together a small travelling exhibition to go round local schools and community centres. The UEL community radio station broadcasts a programme based on some of the material. Further afield a university in the USA is developing a new post graduate course in comparative transport policy and wants to use some of the material for teaching purposes. A consortium of schools in the Australian outback want to link up via the Internet with schools in East London to take the comparative theme further. An oral history group in Scotland exchange material from work they have done around the same theme. A film production company who are making a documentary programme about Virtual Community want to use material from the mural and ICT projects as examples of ‘ the decline of future shock’. Their request is referred to the users committee who agree, provided due acknowledgement and a proper fee is paid to the schools involved !

This is an example of a topic which ‘takes off’ . Other topics may not generate so much breadth of interest, but might yield a smaller amount of unusual and high quality material. New themes and topic clusters will emerge reflecting the interests of different groups as they become involved. The multiple links within and between data levels

( viz data element,knowledge map, knowledge chain) , facilitates this kind of take up.

V. Medium Term Developmental Strategy

V.i Building the Collections

The following will constitute the main holdings developed during the second phase:

· Personal and cultural biographies with particular emphasis on experiences and stories of family and working life; patterns of life long learning; participation in community groups, trade unions, arts and other organisations; migration, settlement and diasporic communication flows;