Establishment of the East London Mosque Archives

/ Jane Ronson / Leave a comment

Archives Hub feature for August 2022

About the East London Mosque Archives

Mosque, referred to as a place of worship for Muslims is probably not something that would jump to our minds when we think of archives. It is not surprising then that people are often intrigued to learn that the East London Mosque, which is one of London’s oldest Mosque has its own archive repository located in its complex; the Maryam Centre in Whitechapel. Established as an archive service in 2015, the ELM Archives as it is commonly called, has unique and rich archive collections documenting the various aspects of British Muslim-related history, which is housed in a purpose built Strong Room. At the moment, it is the only mosque in Britain with such facility.

Strong Room, November 2017. Section of the mobile roller racking within the new purpose built Strong Room with some of the East London Mosque archives on the shelves.
Strong Room, November 2017. Section of the mobile roller racking within the new purpose built Strong Room with some of the East London Mosque archives on the shelves.

The ELM Archives Project

The ELM Archives holds the institutional records, dating from 1910 onwards of the East London Mosque Trust, which is responsible for the administration and management of the Mosque. What is perhaps not widely known is that the Archives came into existence from a campaign initiated by the Mosque to preserve its own heritage. This all begun in 1995, when the late Muhammad Suleiman Jetha who was a former Chairman of the East London Mosque rediscovered and bequeathed the documents he had taken during the World War II bombings for safekeeping back to the Mosque. The deposit contained the London Mosque Fund Minute Book and collection of letters, which provided wealth of information on the creation and shaping of the East London Mosque. Realising the value, this led to the start of an effort, later to become recognised as the ELM Archives Project, to professionally organise and store the Mosque archives.

The London Mosque Fund Minute Book, 1910-1951
The London Mosque Fund Minute Book, 1910-1951. Part of the East London Mosque Trust archive collection, the London Mosque Fund Minute Book records a great deal of information right back to the first meeting in 1910, including how the London Mosque Fund raised money; how it invested the funds when they were established; the search for property; and how the fund helped other organisations in the interim period before it bought the premises for the Mosque. The minutes are written in a beautiful handwriting for the first 150 pages and from 1930s onwards there inserts of typewritten sheets.

Not much was done until 2012 when the Mosque secured the help of a qualified Archivist to carry out a two day scoping study of the existing materials to identify the work required for long term protection and management of the archives. The report compiled at the end offered recommendations on how to classify, catalogue, preserve and provide access to the archives.

Further progress was made as the Mosque submitted a successful application for The National Archives’ Cataloguing Grants programme in 2013. This secured a grant to recruit a temporary Archivist for 1 year to catalogue the archives. At the same time, an Archives Steering Group was formed, comprising of different individuals with relevant expertise within the Mosque and externally from the Religious Archives Group to deliver strategic guidance for the Project. By the end of 2014, the archives were appraised, sorted and catalogued accordingly to best practice in archival standards onto the Archives Hub. Moreover, all the archive materials were labelled, repackaged into acid free folders and put into acid free boxes.

Transition to Archives Service

Inside of The London Mosque Fund Minute Book, 1910-1951.
Inside of The London Mosque Fund Minute Book, 1910-1951.

The success of the cataloguing meant that the archive collection of the East London Mosque Trust went live on the Archives Hub in September 2014, and for the time it was made available to the public for online browsing. To accommodate enquiries and facilitate requests to access the archives, 9 volunteers were recruited. They were given training on how to retrieve and put away documents, supervise researchers and assist with basic queries by the Archivist.

The Reading Room service and the online catalogue were officially launched in January 2015. Since then, the Archives has been hosting both internal and external researchers. Access to the Reading Room is free and open to everyone. The Reading Room currently operates on a part time basis and researchers are requested to book an appointment in advance before their intended visit. Further details of the opening hours can be found on the Archives repository homepage within the Archives Hub.

For the long term storage of the archive materials, the Archives Steering Group researched and developed specifications and requirements to build a purpose built Strong Room in the Maryam Centre. Standards relevant at the time, such as PD 5454:2012 Guide for the Storage and Exhibition of Archival Materials and The National Archives’ Standard for Record Repositories, which gave recommendations for storing and keeping archives within best practice and incorporated factors such as repository construction, storage environment, fire protection and prevention and temperature and humidity parameters were taken into consideration. The built also took into account archival storage needs for the next 50 years. Soon after, fundraising for the necessary construction and equipment began. The building of the Strong Room, equipped with mobile shelving, monitoring system for humidity, humidifiers and extractors, fire proofing and fire alarm system and water drainage arrangements was accomplished and inaugurated on 22 November 2017 by Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.

Launch Day, January 2015. The event celebrated the completion of cataloguing of the East London Mosque Trust archive collection and launch of the online catalogue on Archives Hub and opening of the Reading Room service. Photograph shows Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, Simon Hughes, Former Minister for Justice and Civil Liberties, Eilís McCarthy, Project Archivists with Archive Volunteers.
Launch Day, January 2015. The event celebrated the completion of cataloguing of the East London Mosque Trust archive collection and launch of the online catalogue on Archives Hub and opening of the Reading Room service. Photograph shows Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, Simon Hughes, Former Minister for Justice and Civil Liberties, Eilís McCarthy, Project Archivists with Archive Volunteers.

The ELM Archives Now

It has been a long journey and the ELM Archives has now transitioned from a Project to a Service. In 2018, a part time permanent Archivist was employed by the Mosque to manage the growing archive collections. The Archives started with the intention of just preserving the history of the East London Mosque but now endeavours to create a repository for all and any records relating to British Muslims in Britain.

With the collecting remit broadened, at present, the Archives has the following archival collections in its holdings:

Due to a backlog, not all these collections have been fully catalogued and made available on the Archives Hub yet. Please contact the East London Mosque Archives for further information.     

Further Information 

Browse all the East London Mosque Archives collection descriptions on the Archives Hub.

Ways to connect with the East London Mosque Archives:

Email: archives@londonmuslimcentre.org.uk

Website: http://eastlondonmosquearchives.org.uk/

Twitter: @ELM Archives

Instagram: ELM_Archives

To discover the history of the East London Mosque, from the formation of the London Mosque Fund in 1910, the opening of the first Mosque buildings in 1941, making of the Mosque in Whitechapel to the present day, browse the following links:

https://www.eastlondonmosque.org.uk/history

https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/oms/the-east-london-mosque

https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/954/detail/

The London Mosque Fund Minute Book from the East London Mosque Trust archive collection has been digitised and a copy can be accessed here:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/royal-historical-society-camden-fifth-series/article/london-mosque-fund/800E27BBC9A990B01C1AB43B7515A079

Shahera Begum, Archivist
East London Mosque & London Muslim Centre

All images copyright East London Mosque Archives. Reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holders.

Larkin with archives

/ Jane Ronson / Leave a comment

Archives Hub feature for August 2022

Preserving a literary legacy…

‘I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you’re an artist, by children if you’re not’ (PAL, letter to Monica Jones)

Self-portrait taken by Larkin whilst on a beach in Sark with Monica Jones, 1961 [RefNo. U DLV/2/5/49]

The 9th of August 2022 marks the centenary of the birth of poet and librarian Philip Arthur Larkin.

His approach to life as represented in the above quote will resonate with anyone involved in archival work and research. It speaks to the core function of the archivist in preserving the surviving evidence of past thoughts, beliefs and events.

Although not born in Hull, Larkin was intimately connected with the city. Appointed to the post of Librarian at the University of Hull in March 1955, he spent half of his life in the area, living first in Cottingham, then in Hull’s Pearson Park, and finally in the well-to-do area of Newland Park near the University. Some of his most famous works were inspired by the experience of living in, travelling from and returning to the city. During his time at the University, he guided the library through a period of significant development, helping to transform it from a small operation in a series of makeshift spaces, to a purpose built and sector-leading academic library. Through his collaboration with academic colleagues, he promoted the growth of Hull University Archives from a small selection of manuscripts to an internationally significant repository for archive collections. So, it is fitting that his surviving archive is held at Hull as part of the University Archives.

Creative process of a poet…

‘[T]o construct a verbal device that would preserve an experience indefinitely by reproducing it in whoever read the poem’ (PAL, definition of the purpose of a poet, from Required Reading)

Self-portrait taken by Larkin whilst in Oxford, 1941 [RefNo. U DLV/2/1/14]

One of the most important of the Larkin related collections held at Hull is his personal archive which contains, amongst other things, his manuscript poetry workbooks.

Draft of poem ‘Fiction and the reading public’, 19 May 1949 [RefNo U DPL/1/2/56]

Written in pencil, they contain manuscript drafts of poems written by Larkin, and provide evidence that he drafted and redrafted individual poems over several days or weeks, even returning to them months later. The pages sometimes feature small doodles or comments, giving us an insight into his feelings and state of mind in a given moment. Thus, the workbooks are a vital and unique record of Larkin’s creative process.

Capturing a view on life…

‘I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you’re an artist, by children if you’re not’ (PAL, letter to Monica Jones)

Spring Bank Cemetery taken by Larkin, c.1960s [RefNo. U DLV/3/249/14]

Aside from writing poetry, Larkin was a keen and skilled amateur photographer and the evidence is preserved in his photographic archive [RefNo. U DLV]. Having shown an interest in photography from a young age, Larkin was given a camera to use by his father, a Houghton-Butcher Ensign Carbine No.5. In a letter dated 1947, addressed to a childhood friend, he notes that he has spent a large amount of money on a camera of his own, believed to be a Purma Special. From this point there was no looking back, and later on he became known for his use of a professional quality Rolleiflex camera with timers, lenses and filters.

Gull streaked mud flats along the banks of the Humber River, taken and marked up for enlargement by Larkin, c.1957 [RefNo. U DLV/3/91/4 and U DLV/2/5/32]

His approach to photography seems akin to that of his writing. His photographs skilfully capture the experience of everyday life according to fundamental principles of photographic composition. His subjects regularly include self-portraits, rural landscapes, church yards, and the friends, family and women in his life. His surviving photographs often show evidence that he marked up prints for enlargement to create a better composition.

Communication is key…

‘Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself’ (PAL, This be the verse)

Self-portrait of Larkin and Monica Jones, taken by Larkin, c.1950s [U DMA]

In an age of emails, texts and social media, we perhaps forget how important letter writing was to communication in the mid-20th century. Larkin was a prolific letter writer, maintaining contact with friends, acquaintances, and family on a regular basis. There are many collections of his correspondence at Hull.

Letter from Larkin to James ‘Jim’ Sutton, 1940 [U DP174/2/9]

Highlights include letters sent to Monica Jones, his life-long partner [RefNo. U DX341], which reveal their close and frank relationship, along with aspects of Larkin’s character and life views. Another highlight is the correspondence between Larkin and his childhood friend James Sutton [U DP174 and U DP182]. The two friends discuss home life, friends, jazz music, and their current creative endeavours, which provides opportunity to explore Larkin’s formative years at home, school and university.

Further information…

In this centenary year we’ve been busy working to enhance access to the Larkin collections, improving catalogue descriptions, producing a new source guide and creating an online exhibition.

To access the source guide: https://libguides.hull.ac.uk/archives-at-hhc/published-guides

To explore the online exhibition: https://libguides.hull.ac.uk/larkin100/home

Claire Weatherall, Archivist
Hull University Archives

Related

Collections at Hull University Archives relating to Philip Larkin – letters, papers and more

Browse all Hull University Archives descriptions on the Archives Hub

Previous features on Hull University Archives

For those in peril on the sea – Seamen’s Missions archives at Hull History Centre (2019)

Papers of the Association of Chief Police Officers – the National Reporting Centre (2016)

Liberty, Parity and Justice at the Hull History Centre (2010)

All images copyright Hull University Archives. Reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holders.

Archives Revealed: the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth

/ Jane Ronson / Leave a comment

Archives Hub feature for July 2022

CS8/2861 – Telegram informing SCC (Spencer Compton Cavendish, Lord Hartington), in his capacity as Lord President of Council, of the death of Queen Victoria.

In April 2021, work began to catalogue key collections of the Cavendish family papers in the Devonshire Collection Archives at Chatsworth House, funded by an Archives Revealed Cataloguing Grant.

At the completion of this project, the collections listed below will be searchable using the item-level catalogues on Archives Hub:

Rather than regurgitating the Scope and Content of the catalogues in this blog (which you can read if you click on the links above), I’d like to highlight ten thoughts/statements prompted by items I came across when cataloguing.

It must be acknowledged that this material was largely created and collected by the upper echelons of privileged British aristocratic society, and so the view provided by the material relates to people who were, on the whole, white, wealthy and powerful. Glimmers of other peoples’ stories can be ascertained sometimes, but usually as a by-product of the record creation and retention process rather than directly from those individuals.   

1. School-aged children will always doodle in their exercise books

A number of 17th century exercise books belonging to the 2nd and 3rd Earls of Devonshire are part of the Hardwick Manuscripts (HMS) and Hobbes Papers (HS). Many of them are covered in griffonage on the flyleaves, just as one might expect of a schoolbook today.

Figure 1 HMS/4/34
Figure 2 HS/D/1 c. 1630s and cover of HMS/4/34

They include the 3rd Earl practising his new name “William Devonshire” When, aged 9 ½ he lost his father, the title of Earl of Devonshire passed to him, therefore entitling him to sign himself with the surname Devonshire rather than Cavendish.

Figure 3 Back inside cover of HMS/4/34
Figure 4 HS/D/9 Scribblings of the 2nd Earl? And the Ovid hexameter “Hei mihi quod nullis amor est medicabilis herbis” (Hey me! Love cannot be cured by herbs)

2. Financial account books are a window into daily life

The Hardwick Manuscripts include some astonishingly well-preserved 16th– and 17th-century financial account books from across the Devonshire estates. Some of the most fascinating for the study of daily life in an English aristocratic household are those that record the grocery shop!

Here is an example of Bess of Hardwick’s household spending recorded by her steward for one Thursday in February 1552:

two poteles of claret wine for dinner; eggs; apples to roast; items to make fritters; ale to make fritters; an item delivered to a person for his “bele”; a pint of “momse” for when her ladyship was sick – totalling 4 shillings, 1 ½ pence.

Figure 5 HMS/1/2 fol. 66

As well as listing provisions (food bought from tenant farmers on the estates) and achats (food bought from town), the kitchen accounts for the 3rd Earl’s household for the years 1640-1678 note the guests dining on particular days. Names include: Lord [Henry] Clifford; Lady Windsor; Lady Salisbury [mother to Elizabeth, Countess of Devonshire]; Lord Cranborne [brother of Elizabeth] and Sir Ed Caple [possibly Cappell, a known Royalist family].

Figure 6 HMS/1/22/ An extract of a kitchen account book, showing items bought and used for one week in December 1640, with names of guests staying along the top of the record.

3. Death was still upsetting even though it was common

Losing a family member or friend during one’s own lifetime may have been more common in the 17th and 18th century, but letters in these collections suggest it was not any less of an emotional event because of its regularity.

The letters of Rachel, Lady Russell (c. 1636-1723), show how the execution of her husband – in 1683 for his involvement in the treasonous Rye House Plot – affected her for a long time afterwards. She put on a public show of composure to most of her correspondents. However, her innermost sorrow and grief she shared with her chaplain, Dr Fitzwilliam.

Even three years after her husband’s death she writes:

“…desiring to know the world no more, [I] am utterly unfitted for the management of anything in it, but must, as I can, engage in such necessary offices to my children, as I cannot be dispensed from, nor desire to be, since ‘tis an eternal obligation upon me, to the memory of a husband, to whom, and his, I have dedicated the few and sad remainder of my days, in this vale of misery and trouble.”

Figure 7 Rachel, Lady Russell Engraving by John Cochran, after Samuel Cooper, 17th century (public domain*)

4. Women held power

Despite Lady Russell’s deep sorrow that lasted most of the rest of her life, she continued to engage a network of acquaintances through her letter writing. Reading her letters provides a picture of a woman who used the position of a wealthy widow to her advantage in the advance of her estates and her daughters’ positions in society. There are many letters between Lady Russell and her lawyer, John Hoskins (CS1/34); and her cousin Henri de Massaue, 2nd Marquis du Ruvigny (CS1/97). They present an example of how aristocratic women engaged with the management of their estates as much as – and sometimes more than – male landowners, when their widowhood provided them with the opportunity to take control.

Another example of this is Dorothy Boyle (nee Savile), Countess of Burlington (CS1/164), who like Lady Russell, was responsible for the preservation of large groups of inherited family letters, which make up the Cavendish Family and Associates: 1st Correspondence Series, 1490-1839 (CS1) collection at Chatsworth. The archive is a place of power, and the stewardship of family papers ensured these two women could assert theirs.

5. Archival sources and scholarship don’t always align

In most scholarship, the portrayal of Dorothy, Lady Burlington’s influence and legacy is almost non-existent. Eclipsed by the reputation of her architect husband, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, Lady Burlington has been a footnote or a minor character in repeated anecdotes. Her letters illuminate a more significant role as a facilitator of the Burlington circle and in 18th-century artistic society. You can read more here.

6. Mental health illness isn’t a modern issue

Many references are made to ‘low mood’, ‘upset humours’, ‘delirium’, ‘nerves’, ‘nervous cases’, ‘hysterics’ in the 18th century letters. Whilst some of the language used is different to how we would describe illnesses such as depression and anxiety today, the references do show that mental health was a case for comment just as much as peoples’ physical health.

Elizabeth Biddulph (nee Bedingfeld) wrote to Lady Charlotte, Marchioness of Hartington in 1754 (CS1/378/1) of her prolonged “illness of the nerves” that began after the birth of her last child. Could she be describing what we would nowadays identify as post-partum depression?

Figure 8 Extract from CS1/378/1 Elizabeth Biddulph describing her “disorder” after her last childbirth to Charlotte, Marchioness of Hartington

7. Fresh air and exercise were known cures for illness

As with the above letter where we see that fresh air and exercise aided Elizabeth Biddulph’s recovery, the 4th Duke of Devonshire’s brother, Lord Frederick Cavendish, in December 1761, advised his brother to partake of the same. The 4th Duke, having suffered from a bout of poor mental and physical health, was given the following warning by his brother:

“if you set in that room in London and fret yourself about our damned politics, you’ll kill yourself. Go down to Chatsworth look at your works, and keep yourself out in the air the whole day, I don’t joke… if you was to sleep once or twice a week on the top of Lindop [woods near Chatsworth] I believe it would be better than all the physic that doctors can give”. (CS4/1565)

8. It’s possible to draw out historically overlooked people in fleeting remarks

A passing reference to three black children arriving on a French cargo ship into Waterford 1756 in one of the letters of Lord Frederick Cavendish led me to research who they were and what might have happened to them. You can read the full story here.

9. Lord Hartington visited Confederate lines and it changed his opinion of the South

Spencer Compton Cavendish, Lord Hartington (1833-1908), visited North America in 1862/3, during the American Civil War. He wrote to his father, the 7th Duke of Devonshire, that seeing the Confederates and their earnestness at Richmond had caused him to begin to support their view. He described himself as becoming more “Southern” as the trip progressed and believed the Southerners to have a lot of “dignity”.  This was around the time of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1 January 1863) that “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states, “are, and henceforward shall be free”, which would have the biggest effect on some of the Southern states.

Hartington admitted he had not seen enough plantations to be a judge of “the state of things”. However, he wrote that “the “Negroes” hardly look as well off as I expected to see them but they are not [different?] or more uncomfortable looking than Irish labourers” (CS8/184) – a damning indictment of the state of conditions for 19th century Irish labourers!

On the 21 January 1863 he wrote to his father from Charleston, South Carolina, that the Emancipation Proclamation hadn’t seemed to make “the slightest difference” and “even in the Sea Islands [Georgia] in the possession of the enemy, they hear that the “negroes” are doing their work just as usual under the overseers”.

Figure 9 CS8/184 Letter from SCC to his father, William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire, written from Charleston 21 January 1863

These changed views were clearly private ones as, in another letter to his father, he acknowledges his constituents would not approve of his Southern persuasions (CS8/186).

10. British concentration camps existed before Nazi ones

A reference in a letter from Sir Lawrence Oliphant to Louisa Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, February 1900 (CS8/2824), mentions his arrival in South Africa and the capture of Boer weapons, women and cattle. He mentions a group of “Freestater” women [from the Orange Free State] who were “delighted not to be taken to the camps”. A reminder that the British used concentration camps for Boer women and children in the South African Boer War – a generation before the Nazis.

Figure 10 CS8/2824 Letter from Sir Lawrence Oliphant to Louisa, Duchess of Devonshire, 18 February 1900

I hope that these ten points have shown what wide-ranging material is featured in the Cavendish family papers catalogued in this project and the benefit of having the full catalogues available online on Archives Hub!

Frankie Drummond Charig
Project Archivist, Chatsworth

Related

Browse all Devonshire Collection Archives, Chatsworth descriptions on the Archives Hub

Previous feature on The Devonshire Collection Archives, Chatsworth (2019)

* Portrait of Rachel Wriothesley, Lady Russell. Engraved by John Cochran after a portrait by Samuel Cooper. Image in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

All other images copyright The Devonshire Collection Archives, Chatsworth. Reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holders.

Assessing Machine Learning Outputs

/ Jane Stevenson / Leave a comment

One of the challenges that we face with our Labs project is presentation of the Machine Learning results.  We thought there would be many out of the box tools to help with this, but we have not found this to be the case.

If we use the AWS console Rekognition service interface for example, we get presented with results, but they are not provided in a way that will readily allow us and our project participants to assess them. Here is a screenshot of an image from Cardiff University – an example of out of the box use of AWS Rekognition:

Excavation at Stonehenge, Cardiff University Photographic Archive

This is just one result – but we want to present the results from a large collection of images. Ideally we would run the image recognition on all of the Cardiff images, and/or on the images from one collection, assess the results within the project team and also present them back to our colleagues at Cardiff.

The ML results are actually presented in JSON:

Excerpt from JSON showing ML output

Here you can see some of the terms identified and the confidence scores.

These particular images, from the University archive, are catalogued to item level. That means they may not benefit so much from adding tags or identifying objects. But they are unlikely to have all the terms (or ‘labels’ in ML parlance) that the Rekognition service comes up with.  Sometimes the things identified are not what a cataloguer would necessarily think to add to a description. The above image is identified as ‘outdoors’, ‘ground’ and ‘soil. These terms could be useful for a researcher. Just identifying photographs with people in them could potentially be useful.

Another example below is of a printed item – a poem.

Up in the Wind, Papers of Edward Thomas, Cardiff University

Strange formatting of the transcript aside, the JSON below shows the detected text (squirrels), confidence and area of the image where the word is located.

Detected word ‘squirrels’

If this was provided to the end user, then anyone interested in squirrels in literature (surely there must be someone…) can find this digital content.  

But we have to figure out how to present results and what functionality is required. It reminds me of using Open Refine to assess person name matches.  The interface provides for a human eye to assess and confirm or reject the results.

Screenshot of names matching using Open Refine
Screenshot of names matching using Open Refine

We want to be able to lead discussions with our contributors on the usefulness, accuracy, bias – lack of bias – and peculiarities of machine learning, and for that a usable interface is essential.

How we might knit this in with the Hub description is something to consider down the line. The first question is whether to use the results of ML at all.  However, it is hard to imagine that it won’t play a part as it gets better at recognition and classification.  Archvists often talk about how they don’t have time to catalogue. So it is arguable that machine learning, even if the results are not perfect, will be an improvement on the backlogs that we currently have.    

AWS Rekognition tools

We have thought about which tools we would like to use and we are currently creating a spreadsheet of the images we have from our participants and which tools to use with each group of images.

Some tools may seem less likely, for example, image moderation. But with the focus on ethics and sensitive data, this could be useful for identifying  potentially offensive or controversial images.

blanked out image
Blanked out image

The Image Moderation tool recognises nudity in the above image. 

confidence scores for nudity
The confidence scores are high that this image represents nudity

This could be carried through to the end user interface, and a user could click on ‘view content’ if they chose to do so.

image of nude
Art Design and Architecture Collection, Glasgow School of Art (NMC/1137)

The image moderation tool may classify images art images as sensitive when they are very unlikely to cause offence.  The tools may not be able to distinguish offensive nudity from classical art nudity. With training it is likely to improve, but when you think about it, it is not always an easy line for a human to draw.

Face comparison could potentially be useful where you want to identify individuals and instances of them within a large collection of photographs for example, so we might try that out.  

However, we have decided that we won’t be using ‘celebrity recognition’, or ‘PPE detection’ for this particular project!

Text and Images

We are particularly interested in text and in text within images.  It might be a way to connect images, and we might be able to pull the text out to be used for searching.

Suffice to say that text will be very variable. We ran Transkribus Lite on some materials.

Transkribus on a handwritten letter
Letter from the Papers of Edward Thomas at Cardiff University

We compared this to use of AWS Text Rekognition.

Transkribus on a handwritten letter
Letter from the Papers of Edward Thomas at Cardiff University

These examples illustrate the problem with handwritten documents. Potentially the model could be trained to work better for handwriting, but this may require a very large amount of input data given the variability of writing styles.

Transkribus on a typescript letter
Poem from the Papers of Edward Thomas, Cardiff University

Transkribus has transcribed this short typescript text from the same archive well.  One word ‘house’ has been transcribed as ‘housd’ and ‘idea’ caused a formatting issue, but overall a good result.

Transkribus on a poster
Poster from the Design Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives

The above example is Transkribus Lite on a poster from the University of Brighton Design Archives.  In archives, many digital items are images with text – particularly collections of posters or flyers. Transkribus has not done well with this (though this is just using the Lite version out of the box).  

Rekognition on a poster

We also tried this with the AWS Rekognition Text tool, and it worked well.

Another example of images with text is maps and plans.

Lambeth Palace map of London
19th century map of Clerkenwell, Lambeth Palace Archive
JSON output showing place name
JSON output showing place name

Above are two examples of places identified from the plan output in JSON. If we can take these outputs and add them to our search interface, an end user could search for ‘clerkenwell’ or ‘northampton square’ and find this plan.  

Questions we currently have:

  • How do we present the results back to the project team?
  • How do we present the results to the participants?
  • Do we ask participants specific questions in order to get structured feedback?
  • Will we get text that is useful enough to go to the next step?
  • Which images provide good text and which don’t?
  • How might they results be used on the Archives Hub to help with discovery?

As we progress the work, we will start to think about organising a workshop for participants to get their feedback on the ML outputs.

The Edge Hill University Archive

/ Jane Ronson

Archives Hub feature for June 2022

Edge Hill University’s history dates back to the 1880s when a committee was formed in 1882 to establish a teacher training college for women in Liverpool. Students would be instructed “in the Christian Religion upon a Scriptural but undenominational basis.”

The minutes of the first meeting of the Edge Hill Training College Committee, February 1882. Ref: EHU/GOV/1/12.

The College was opened on Durning Road in the Edge Hill district of Liverpool in January 1885, with just 41 students. Sarah Jane Yelf was appointed as the College’s first Principal, with the intention of producing ‘a superior class of Elementary School Mistresses’. Sarah Jane Hale took over as principal in 1890 and the institution began a gradual expansion. Miss Hale died in 1920 and by the end of her tenure the College had trained 2,071 girls, of whom 213 were Head Mistresses, 178 First Assistants, and 30 science mistresses. Miss Hale’s successor in 1920 was Eva Marie Smith and she would continue with the ambitious expansion of the College, with it by now having a firmly established reputation for excellence.

Postcard showing the original Edge Hill College on Durning Road, Liverpool.

Miss Smith and her colleagues had begun to feel that the Durning Road site was not suitable for the growing student and staff population (as well as facing regular problems with the upkeep of the site. In 1925, Edge Hill was placed under the control of Lancashire County Council who would provide a new building for the college, preserving the original name, history and reputation. A site in Ormskirk was chosen and the foundation stone of the new building was laid in 1931, before opening in October 1933.

During the Second World War, the College was evacuated to Bingley Training College while the campus served as a military hospital. The original Durning Road premises were destroyed in a German bombing raid on 28 November 1940, killing 166 people – the worst single incident in the Liverpool Blitz as regards loss of life.

The gradual expansion of the Ormskirk campus resumed after the War and, in 1959, the first male students were welcomed to the College. During the 1960s courses were expanded and diversified, with a rapidly developing range of degree courses on offer.

Watercolour of Edge Hill College, Ormskirk, by an unknown student, 1950s. Ref: EHU/GUAL/3/27/4.

Over the next decades, the institution would maintain its reputation for excellence in teacher training while also steadily expanding a range of successful degree courses in other areas. This acceleration of curriculum, infrastructure and institutional development has continued to the present day, with the University Title awarded in 2006.

The Edge Hill University archives offer a wealth of potential areas for research. The collections have vast potential for the history of teacher training, women’s education and the changing lives of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The expansion of Edge Hill in recent decades means its history has a great deal to tell us about the development of higher education in Britain as well as the changing experiences of those who studied and were employed here. Each milestone changed and broadened the horizons of what Edge Hill University is today.

Photograph of a page from a student’s autograph album portraying the highs and lows of Test Week, c. 1904. Ref: EHU/GUAL/3/12/1.

It would be fantastic to see this collection being used more for research. It has already proven a fantastic resource for historians of women’s suffrage, with a number of Edge Hill’s alumni having been active in the fight for equality and some becoming particularly well-known figures such as the barrister and women’s rights campaigner, Helena Normanton and the socialist, feminist and human rights campaigner, Ethel Snowden. Discussions around women’s suffrage and equality were often covered and reported on in the annual Edge Hill College magazines – a wonderfully rich series of documents that reveal much about the cultural shifts in the lives of women during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Four Edge Hill students, 1922.

The dedicated cataloguing of the archive only began in late 2019, so there is a huge amount of material yet to be catalogued, as well as a constant flow of new accessions arriving at the archive, so researchers are encouraged to contact us if they cannot find things that they might expect to find listed, would like to find out more about the collections or have a specific enquiry we might be able to support them with. Get in touch and discover an archive collection that is overflowing with untapped potential!

Dan Copley
Edge Hill University Archivist

Related

Edge Hill University and Predecessors, c. 1882-c. 2019

Edge Hill University Archives on the Archives Hub

All images copyright Edge Hill University Archives. Reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holders.

Using AI to Write Blog Posts

/ Adrian Stevenson

Given that Hub Labs is looking at AI and we’re also writing blog posts, it seemed like a good opportunity to try out one of the AI blog post writing applications that keep appearing in my various streams. The one that seems to get the best recommendations and is also free to trial is Writesonic. I’ve been meaning to write a post about our initial steps to build the AWS cloud infrastructure for Labs, so I thought I would use this as the basis for the experiment. You essentially provide a title, in this case I chose ‘Getting Started with Machine Learning in the Cloud’, and it will then provide some intros and outlines that you can accept or reject before it goes on to produce some copy. The best copy I could get it to produce given the options provided is pasted in below. You can see it’s a bit marketing speak and it was no great surprise that it’s not proved to be of much use for my experiment at least. For some reason it wanted to assume we are using Google Cloud and didn’t offer any AWS copy. It was interesting to try it though, and I could see it might be useful for more general posts.

The AI generated copy (italised by me) including the image is pasted below:

Getting Started with Machine Learning in the Cloud

Image Source: Freepik‍

The practice of machine learning involves training computer algorithms to recognize patterns in data and make predictions based on those patterns. It takes a lot of resources to implement machine learning in your business. There are many different datasets, tools, and software packages that you need to understand and choose from before you canput them to work analyzing your data and building your algorithm. This blog post discusses how you can use cloud services for machine learning with an example using Google Cloud Machine Learning (Cloud ML) and its APIs for Natural Language Processing (NLP).

What is Machine Learning?

There are many definitions of machine learning, including the IEEE’s “A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and some performance measure P if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E.” Or, as silly as it sounds, you can think about machine learning as a computer program that takes a bunch of data and spits out a prediction. You’re the one that has to tell the program how to do it.

Cloud ML with its APIs for NLP

Google Cloud Machine Learning workflows let you build and manage machine learning models in Google Cloud. Cloud ML supports a variety of machine learning frameworks, including TensorFlow, Caffe 2, and Apache MXNet. Cloud ML also provides a set of Natural Language APIs to support natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including sentiment analysis and entity extraction. Cloud ML’s NLP APIs can be accessed programmatically through its REST APIs.

Create a dataset using BigQuery

When you’re collecting data for machine learning, it’s important that your data be as accurate as possible. Google’s BigQuery lets you create a dataset in the cloud, and then you can use Google’s Natural Language API to analyze that dataset and get a breakdown of the different parts of speech. BigQuery is Google’s fully managed, enterprise data warehouse for business analytics. With BigQuery, you can query large data sets using standard SQL and get results in seconds. It’s also fully integrated with Google’s other analytical and collaboration tools, such as Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, and Google Cloud Platform.

Create a model using TensorFlow

With your dataset collected and a model for the Natural Language API built, you can create the model with TensorFlow. In this example, you’ll be building a model for sentiment analysis, which means you’ll be using the API’s sentiment analysis functionality. If you’re new to TensorFlow, don’t worry. There are some libraries out there that make it super easy to get started. One of them is tf-python-client, which is a library that allows you to write python code that uses TensorFlow.

Run the model in a Cloud Dataflow job

At this point, you’ve built a model and have everything ready to go. All that’s left to do is plug everything into Cloud Dataflow. Cloud Dataflow is Google’s fully managed, distributed framework for executing streaming data pipelines. Cloud Dataflow lets you build scalable, easy-to-manage data processing pipelines that transform and enrich your data. With Dataflow, you can build data processing and machine learning pipelines in a single, unified programming model. This means that you can build a model that performs data analysis, trains the model, and then deploys it in one workflow instead of three different ones.

Run the model in an API server

Your model is ready to go. Now you’re just missing the code to plug into an API server that can handle your data and send it to BigQuery. The Google Cloud Natural Language API lets you understand the meaning of text. You can use the API to detect entities, sentiments, and other linguistic properties of text. The API supports 82 languages.

Conclusion

Now that you know what machine learning is and have gotten started with Cloud ML and its NLP APIs, you can put this knowledge to use. You can use the NLP APIs to perform sentiment analysis or entity extraction on a dataset. This can be helpful for creating articles, social media posts, or marketing materials that are more effective.

With Cloud ML and its NLP APIs, you can create machine learning models that are more accurate and make more informed predictions. It takes a lot more effort to create models without cloud services, and it’s often difficult to keep track of all of the resources needed. With cloud services, you can focus on the model and not worry about the infrastructure and resources needed to run it.

Stanley Houghton Collection and Salford Digital Archives

/ Jane Ronson

Archives Hub feature for May 2022

This month we explore the recently digitised Stanley Houghton Collection held by the University of Salford and made accessible on Salford Digital Archives.  2022 marks 110 years since the first performance of Houghton’s best-known dramatic work, Hindle Wakes.

Photograph from a Hindle Wakes production in 1912, Ref: SHC/4/2.

About Houghton

William Stanley Houghton (1881-1913) was born in 1881 in Ashton-upon-Mersey, Cheshire and during his short life would become one of a group of playwrights known as the ‘Manchester School’. 

It would seem Houghton had a standard middle-class upbringing.  His father was a cotton cloth merchant in Manchester and in 1896 the family moved to Alexandra Park, a middle-class residential area south of the city from where Houghton attended Manchester Grammar School.  On finishing school, Houghton went straight into his father’s cotton business, where he worked as a ‘grey-cloth’ salesman.  It was during this time whilst working in the city that Houghton was developing his skills as a playwright and supplemented his income by writing critical reviews for the Manchester Guardian. 

Houghton was one of several playwrights championed by Annie Horniman for his focus on what she called ‘real life’.  Horniman was proprietor of Manchester’s Gaiety Theatre, the first repertory theatre outside of London with its own company of actors and a rotating programme of plays by local writers.  It was through the association with the Gaiety that Houghton’s work was performed to audiences in London and America. 

Hindle Wakes

Houghton’s best and most successful work was Hindle Wakes (1912), a comedy about the freedom of the young and the ‘double standard’ of morality. Written in 1911 and premiered at the London Aldwych Theatre in 1912, the play was controversial at the time for its portrayal of a mill girl who shocks the older generation by choosing independence rather than marriage to the mill owners’ son.  The play both appealed and shocked audiences but ultimately proved a hit on an international level.  The financial success of the play, coupled with the production of Houghton’s earlier work The Younger Generation (1909) enabled him to leave the cotton trade and take to writing full time.  

However, Houghton’s career as a full-time writer was short lived.  After moving to London and then Paris, Houghton returned to Manchester in ill health where he died in 1913 at the age of 32.  

Highlights from the collection

Purchased by the university of Salford in 1983, the Stanley Houghton Collection is largely made up of unpublished manuscripts of plays which give insight into his working methods and character.  It was through a ‘chance check in a Manchester telephone directory’ that a PhD student at the University interested in the life and work of the writer discovered Houghton’ living descendants.  It turned out that they had kept a collection of previously unseen manuscripts by Houghton and photographs of early performances ‘wrapped in brown paper…in various suitcases in the house and garage’.

Page from Ginger, Ref: SHC/1/5.
Plan of stage layout for Ginger, Ref: SHC/1/5.

The works are a mixture of comedies, such as Pearls (c1910) which was designed for the music hall, and melodramas such as The Intriguers (c1906) that demonstrate his development as a writer and working method. Ginger (c1910) is evidence of Houghton’s approach to planning and plot development.  I particularly like Houghton’s handwritten note on the page opposite the start of Act 2, to ‘focus Ginger a bit’, which makes me think of Houghton, pencil in hand reviewing his work.   The typescript of Act 3 of Trust the People includes handwritten stage prompts to get the ‘gramophone ready’, giving a sense of how the work might have been produced on stage. 

Page from Trust the People Act 3, Ref: SHC/1/3.

There are also published first edition translations of some of his works including Twixt Cup and Lip, a version of Houghton’s play The Dear Departed in Scots dialect by Felix Fair.

Front cover of Twixt Cup and Lip, Ref: SHC/2/4.

My favourite items in the collection are two sets of photographs of early 20th century theatre productions of Hindle Wakes and The Younger Generation.  They include actors from the Gaiety Repertory Theatre who first performed Hindle Wakes some 110 years ago at the London Aldwych Theatre.  The photos not only capture the sets and costumes of a theatre production at a particular point in time, but are also portraits of early 20th century actresses, including Ada King, Sybil Thorndike and Edyth Goodall. 

Photograph from a Hindle Wakes production in 1912, Ref: SHC/4/2.
Photograph from a Hindle Wakes production in 1912, Ref: SHC/4/2.

I would love to see the Stanley Houghton Collection used more for teaching and research.  Houghton was writing and dramatizing the life and society of the young just before the start the 1914 Great War which of course would have an enormous impact on his own generation. 

Salford Digital Archives

The Houghton manuscripts and photographs are one of several collections now available on Salford Digital Archives, the University of Salford’s new platform to access digital archive content online. 

Other collections on the platform include Brass Band News, a unique newspaper about brass bands from the 1880s up to the 1950s, alongside photographs from the Working Class Movement Library and the Bridgewater Canal.  We are adding new collections to the platform in due course including a set of architectural drawings and plans for the University campus and two series of Salford Student Union newspapers.  We welcome ideas for new collections and opportunities to work in partnership to curate content from our own and other archives. 

Alexandra Mitchell
Archivist, The University of Salford

Related

Stanley Houghton Collection, 1906-1930s

Brass Band News Digital Archive (Online Resource)

Browse all University of Salford Archives & Special Collections descriptions:

On the Archives Hub (main site)

On University of Salford microsite (Archives Hub repository website)

Browse all Working Class Movement Library collection descriptions on the Archives Hub

All images copyright University of Salford Archives & Special Collections. Reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holders.

An Archive of a True Love Story

/ Jane Ronson

Archives Hub feature for April 2022

This is the true love story of Geoffrey Griffiths (1906-1993) and Ida Carroll (1905-1995).

Griff

Referred to as “Griff” by many alumni, the lasting memories of this charming chap are primarily as the pipe-smoking first impression of the Northern School of Music. Stepping into the school off Sydney Street (where the Manchester Metropolitan University’s sport centre is now) his lugubrious voice would greet you amid a stain of smoke.

He was the school’s bursar. He typed up the daily notices on the school’s stairwell pillars, he drove the van full of the larger instruments (and their carefully balanced players) to the concert halls for orchestral performances and he kept everything squared away with the balance sheets.

What many did not know, is that he was in a dedicated relationship with the school’s principal Ida Carroll, for about 60 years.  The only reason we know it now is due to the treasure chest of incredible love letters he sent her.

The letters

He wrote his Christmas letters to her at 1 min past midnight on the 24th so he could technically be the first to wish her Merry Christmas.

Geoffrey wrote letters, beautiful love letters, to Ida throughout their relationship. He would write multiple times a week, often just after getting home late at night from visiting her in order to tell her how much he already missed and loved her.

His writing to her was so prolific it seemed only to continue the conversations they had started when meeting face to face, undoubtedly to be picked up again when they next met. Most are merely introduced as “Monday afternoon”, and “Tuesday evening”.  No need to put down such frivolous details as dates when he’s seeing her again by the end of the week.

There are some incredible references the Second World War when he’s had to hastily put down his pen, pick up his papers and pipe (priorities), and make his way to crouch under the stairs or in the nearest bomb shelter. He is very put out as he continues his letter writing in the cramped din, often cursing Herr Hitler for getting in the way of their love affair, which was apparently damned inconsiderate of him.

Griff pours out his war and wedding anxieties to Ida, 1939 (1).

Ida was an Air Raid Precaution Warden for the Didsbury area of Manchester. Griff was part of the Auxiliary Fire Service in Ashton-under-Lyne, spending many nights in the rooms of a bar parlour with a handful of other chaps, waiting for air raids and the inevitable fires that came after. Many long nights of boredom led to some very interesting letters, full of wartime musings, pining for more time with her, and pages upon pages agonising over details such as the merits of joining a journalism course, the exact details of the journey home, and Whist tactics.

Griff pours out his war and wedding anxieties to Ida, 1939 (2).

The couple apart

However, despite their devotion to one another, they didn’t traditionally exist as a couple. Indeed, they never actually lived together. One reason for this, it would seem, was Walter Carroll.

Walter was Ida’s father, and a firm fan of Griff for all it would appear. Griff worked in the travel agency frequented by Walter for his many trips to London. Over time, they got friendly and upon discovering Griff’s interest in singing and music (he had a cello called Boris), Walter enrolled Griff into his own choir at Birch Church. It’s likely that this is when he got to know and fall in love with Ida.

He would visit her at her family home and seemed openly intimidated by her father who, despite his appreciation of Griff’s musical passion, did not appreciate any other passion of Griff’s finding focus in his daughter.

The majority of their friends were also unaware of their affair. Both avid Hallé concert goers, they would arrange tickets to go with friends, fully intending to casually meet up at the concert, sit together or near, and meet up together after. A sort of stealth date night.

Getting closer and closer was all well and good, but still they never made the marriage/cohabitation plunge. Even though at one time they had planned to get married and were actively hunting for flat to take together. His letters describe in detail their dreams, just as the Second World War was being announced. Unfortunately, Griff’s mother died shortly after their plans were made. Moving out would have meant leaving his father alone in the family home through war and through grief. It seemed that Walter’s unwillingness to support the union and this tragic weight of family duty, led Griff to write a heart-breaking letter explaining why he needed to call off the engagement.

The couple together

Griff and Ida on holiday c.1960.

After the war, he quickly took up the opportunity to work as the Bursar of the Northern School of Music (where Ida was Secretary and later Principal) in 1946. Typical of the Northern School of Music and of Ida’s method of career advice, he was not expected to interview but simply to show up and never leave. Which is pretty much what happened.

They remained dedicated to each other, but never married. Their relationship continued for many years, almost in a perpetuating stage of courting. Griff later fell severely ill and Ida nursed him through to the end of his life, almost moving into the nursing home where he lived his final days.

Griff and Ida c.1990.

A lovely side-note here that shares some of the effectiveness of the school’s teaching. A friend and former student of Ida would visit her at Griff’s nursing home. The building was all locks and electronic key codes and it became a bit of a faff. Ida, having taught aural skills for decades had learned the key codes to the door locks simply based on the melody they made. She would relay this to her old friend in “tonic sol-far” (you know the one: do re mi fa sol…), singing the code notes to her, to allow freer movement in and out of the building when she visited.

While not dramatic opera-esque, or reminiscent of soaring symphony crescendos, this was a quiet, steadfast, romantic love of the ages. To read all the letters, head over to the Manchester Digital Music Archive with a cup of tea and sigh ready in your heart.

Heather Roberts
RNCM College Archivist
Royal Northern College of Music

Related

The Carroll Papers: Walter, Elsa and Ida Carroll, c.1850-1999

Browse all Royal Northern College of Music Archives collection descriptions on the Archives Hub

Previous features on Royal Northern College of Music Archives

Thomas Baron Pitfield (1903-1999): a visual autobiography

All images copyright RNCM Archives. Reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holders.

Machine Learning: Training the Model

/ Jane Stevenson

A recent OCLC paper by Thomas Padilla highlights the need for ‘Pilot collaborations between institutions with representative collections’ and working ‘to share source data and produce “gold standard” training data.‘

We think that the Archives Hub Labs project exemplifes Tom’s suggested approach by working with ten of our contributing institutions from across the UK, reflecting a variety of archives.

However, it is also surely true that cultural heritage will need to engage with the broader AI and ML communities to understand and benefit fully from the range of ML services such as translation, transcription, object identification and facial recognition:

‘Advances in all of these areas are being driven and guided by the government or commercial sectors, which are infinitely better funded  than cultural memory; for example, many nation-states and major corporations are intensively interested  in facial recognition. The key strategy for the cultural memory sector will be to exploit these advantages, adapting and tuning the technologies around the margins for its own needs.’ From a short blog post by Dr Clifford Lynch from the CNI which is well worth reading.

People often criticise Machine Learning for being biased. But bias and mis-representation is essentially due to embedded bias in the input training data. The algorithm learns with what it has. So one of the key tasks for us as an archives community is to think about training data. We need algorithms that are trained to work for us to give us useful outputs.

Gathering training data in order to create useful models is going to be a challenge. Machine Learning is not like anything else that we have done before – we don’t actually know what we’ll get – we just know that we need to give the algorithm data that educates it in the way that we want. A bit like a child in school, we can teach it the curriculum, but we don’t know if it will pass the exam.

It certainly seems a given that we will need to use well labelled archival material as training data, so that the model is tailored specifically to the material we have. We will need to work together to provide this scale of training data. We have many wonderfully catalogued collections, with detail down to item level; as well as many collections that are catalogued quite basically, maybe just at collection level. If we join together as a community and utilise the well-catalogued content to train algorithms, we may be able to achieve something really useful to help make all collections more discoverable.

If an algorithm is trained on a fairly narrow set of data, then it is questionable whether it will have broad applicability. For example, if we train an algorithm on letters written in the 18th century, but just authored by two or three people, then it is unlikely to learn enough to be of real use with transcription; but if we train it on the handwriting of fifty people or more, then it could be a really useful tool for recognising and transcribing 18th century letters To do this training, we will need to bring content together. We will need to share the Machine Learning journey. The benefits could be massive in terms of discoverability of archives; effective discovery for all those materials that we currently don’t have time to catalogue. The main danger is that the resulting identification, transcription, tagging or whatever, is not to the standard that we want. We can only experiment and see what happens if we trial ML with a set of data (which is what we are doing now with our Labs project). One benefit could actually be much more consistency across collections. As someone working on aggregating data from 350 organisations, I can testify that we are not consistent! – and this lack of consistency impairs discovery.

Archival content is likely to be distinct in terms of both quality and subject. Typescripts might be old and faded, manuscripts might be hard to read, photographs might be black and white and not as high resolution as modern prints. Photographs might be of historical artefacts that are not recognised by most algorithms. We have specific challenges with our material, and we need the algorithms to learn from our material, in order to then provide something useful as we input more content.

In terms of subject, the Lotus and Delta shoe shops are a good example of a specific topic. They are represented in the Joseph Emberton papers, at the University of Brighton Design Archives, with a series of photographs. Architecture is potentially an interesting area to focus on. ML could give us some outputs that provide information on architectural features. It could be that the design of Lotus and Delta shops can be connected to other shops with similar architectures and shop fronts. ML may pick out features that a cataloguer may not include. On the other hand, we may find that it is extremely hard to train an algorithm on old black and white and potentially low resolution photographs in order for it to learn what a shop is, and maybe what a shoe shop is.

In this collection a number of the photographs are of exteriors. Some are identified by location, and some are not yet identified.

photo of Emberton shoe shop, Harrogate
Harrogate
Photo of Edinburgh shoe shop exterior
Edinburgh
Photo of unidentified shoe shop
Unidentified shop

These photographs have been catalogued to item level, and so researchers will be able to find these when searching for ‘shops’ and particularly ‘shoe shops’ on the Hub, e.g. a search for ‘harrogate shoe shop‘ finds the exterior of a shop front in Harrogate. There may not be much more that could be provided for searching this collection, unless machine learning could label the type of shop front, the type of windows and signage for example. This seems very challenging with these old photographs, but presumably not impossible. With ML it is a matter of trying things out. You might think that if artificial intelligence can master self-driving cars it can master shop exteriors….but it is not a foregone conclusion.

If the model was trained with this set of photographs, then other shop fronts could potentially be identified in photographs that aren’t catalogued individually. We could potentially end up with collections from many different archives tagged with ‘shop front’ and potentially with ‘shoes’. Whether an unidentified shop front could be be identified is less certain, unless there are definite contextual features to work with.

interior of ladies department shoe shop
Interior of ladies’ dept.
photograph of shoe shop interior
Interior of men’s dept.

Shop interiors are likely to be even more of a challenge. But it will be exciting to try things like this out and see what we get.

Commercial providers offer black box solutions, and we can be sure they were not trained to work well with archives. They may be adapted to new situations, but it is unlikely they can ever work effectively for archival content. I explored this to an extent in my last blog post. However, it is worth considering that a model not trained on archival material may highlight objects or topics that we would not think of including in a catalogue entry.

The Archives Hub and Jisc could play a pivotal role in co-ordinating work to create better models for archival material. Aggregation allows for providing more training material, and thus creating more effective models.

‘To date, most ML projects in libraries have required bespoke data annotation to create sufficient training data. Reproducing this work for every ML project, however, risks wasting both time and labor, and there are ample opportunities for scholars to share and build upon each other’s work.’ (R. Cordell, LC Labs report)

We can have a role to play in ‘data gathering, sharing, annotation, ethics monitoring, and record-keeping processes‘ (Eun Seo Jo, Timnit Gebru, https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.10389). We will need to think about how to bring our contributors into the loop in order to check and feedback on the ML outputs. This is a non-trivial part of the process that we are considering at the moment. We need an interface that displays the results of our ML trials.

One of the interesting aspects of this is that collections that have been catalogued in detail will provide the training data for collections that are not. Will this prove to be a barrier, or will it bring us together as a community? In theory the resources that some archives have, which have enabled them to catalogue to item level, can benefit those with minimal resources. Would this be a free and open exchange, or would we start to see a commercial framework developing?

It is also important that we don’t ignore the catalogue entries from our 350 contributors. Catalogues could provide great fodder for ML – we could start to establish connections and commonalities and increase the utility of the catalogues considerably.

The issue of how to incorporate the results of ML into the end user discovery interface is yet another challenge. Is it fundamentally important that end users know what has been done through ML and what has been done by a human? I can’t help thinking that over time the lines will blur, as we become more comfortable with AI….or as AI simply becomes more integrated into our world. It is clear that many people don’t realise how much Artificial Intelligence sits behind so many systems and processes that we use on an everyday basis. But I think that for the time being, it would be useful to make that distinction within our end user interfaces, so that people know why something has been catalogued or described in a certain way and so that we can assess the effectiveness of the ML contribution.

In subsequent posts we aim to share some initial findings from doing work at scale. We will only be able to undertake some modest experiments, but we hope that we are contributing to the start of what will be a very big adventure for archives.

Uncovering women’s role in Austrian refugee theatre: the exile archives of the Institute of Modern Languages Research  

/ Jane Ronson

Archives Hub feature for March 2022

For the 30,000 traumatised refugees from Nazi-occupied Austria living in the UK at the start of the Second World War, the Austrian exile theatre the Laterndl was a beacon of light and hope during the dark days of the Third Reich. Refugees were living with the loss of their homes, the uncertain fate of families left behind, and the poverty and isolation of exile life. At the theatre they could laugh, weep and mourn together over stories, music and poetry presented by performers who shared the same experiences. For the artists themselves, the theatre allowed them to escape the daily grind of refugee life, provide a home for Austrian culture and contribute to the fight against Nazism.

Laterndl publicity leaflet, 1939 (Miller/6/1/1)

Members of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies at the University of London have begun to piece together the history of the theatre using the papers of Austrian Jewish refugees Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert Miller, key figures at the Laterndl. Their papers are one of a growing number of archives of German-speaking exiles held at Senate House Library on behalf of the Institute of Modern Languages Research. A programme to catalogue and promote the collections has been funded in recent years by the Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert Miller Trust and the records have now been added to the Archives Hub. This feature for the Hub marks Women’s History Month by considering the role of women in the theatre and how they contributed to its aim to keep alive the spirit of resistance to the Nazis.

Five of the 16 artists who contributed to the opening production of the Laterndl in June 1939 were female artists, all experienced professionals. They played an important role both on stage and behind the scenes from the offset. The cast of the first production ‘Unterwegs’ included seasoned theatre performers Lona Cross, Marianne Walla and Greta Hartwig. Cross had performed in regional Austrian theatre and Walla and Hartwig were active in anti-fascist political cabaret in Vienna in the mid-1930s. ‘Unterwegs’ offered a wide range of strong female roles and included one scene, ‘Bow Street’ which was singled out for particular praise by reviewers. Standing on trial at Bow Street court before ‘General Bias’ and ‘Mrs Charity’, Walla, playing the ‘Eternal Woman’ alongside the ‘Eternal Jew’ and the ‘Eternal Revolutionary’, made a powerful plea for leniency and understanding from the British authorities for women who had taken a stand against Nazism.

Greta Hartwig and Martin Miller watching a Laterndl rehearsal, June 1939 (Miller/3/1/1/1)

In early 1940 another Viennese actor already familiar to Austrian theatre audiences joined the troupe, Hannah Norbert Miller (then Hanne Norbert). Norbert soon became one of the leading performers, appearing in over ten productions in three years. She also acted with other exile theatre groups and had a wide network of contacts which helped connect the Laterndl players with the wider German-speaking theatre scene. Norbert’s excellent English enabled her to act as commere, communicating the theatre’s message of resistance against Nazism to British audience members, who included well-known cultural figures like J.B. Priestly and Richard Crossman of the BBC.

Hanne Norbert’s commere script introducing two scenes at the Laterndl, 1940 (Miller/1/2/1/5)

Theatre programmes in the archive indicate that female artists also worked in a range of non-acting roles over the course of the theatre’s existence. Kaethe Knepler was a musician and pianist from Germany who worked as director of music at the Laterndl in 1941 and 1942 together with her husband, Georg, a musicologist. The couple regularly performed as a duo, and in 1940 Kaethe Knepler composed the setting for a song by Jura Soyfer, a young Austrian writer who had died in Buchenwald a year before.

Laterndl programme for a production of Johann Nestroy’s ‘Der Talisman’, 1941 (Miller/5/1/9)

Costumes for the first three productions were the responsibility of two Viennese designers, Hertha Winter and Kaethe Berl. Little is known about Winter’s background, but Berl had studied design at art school and in the post-war era she would became a pioneer in enamel art in New York. With wartime shortages and the Laterndl’s tiny budget, the pair had to summon all their creativity to produce costumes, improvising them out of old garments or purchasing them cheaply here and there, including in the East End’s Petticoat Lane. Berl also designed the distinctive red logo for the theatre shown on the programme (above).

‘Trip to Paradise’ by Jura Soyfer, performed by the Laterndl Theatre, showing costume designed by Herta Winter, with Marianne Walla as Fritzi on the right, 1940 (Miller/3/1/1/5)

One of the most powerful anti-Nazi plays produced by the Laterndl was written by the theatre’s only female writer, journalist and Communist activist Eva Priester. Priester’s ‘The Verdict’, performed in the autumn of 1942, saw Norbert and Walla play two women imprisoned in a cell together in an unknown location in Nazi Europe. The women unite against their male guard and anticipate the liberation of Europe with the declaration: ‘We are not alone. They will come over the sea, by ship, any moment now they could come and land in France and open our doors. Can you hear them – soon they will break down the iron doors – soon they will be here!’

Eva Priester’s ‘The Verdict’, performed by the Laterndl Theatre, with Marianne Walla (left) and Hanne Norbert (right), 1942 (Miller/3/1/1/10)

By the end of the war over 40 women refugees had worked at the theatre, some of them over several years. How many of them managed to rebuild their careers as artists in the post-war world is not recorded these archives, though for a lucky few, at least, the Laterndl was a stepping stone to a career in the performing arts in the UK, such as the BBC. What is clear is that, despite the hardship and pain of their situation, women played a central role in the theatre, helping to keep alive the hopes of the community in a better post-war world and an independent and democratic Austria.

Dr Clare George
Archivist (Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Trust)
Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies
Institute of Modern Languages Research
University of London School of Advanced Study
Senate House Library

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All images copyright Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London. Reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holders.