Know Your Bristol On The Move
‘Know Your Bristol On the Move’ is the current phase of the bigger ‘Know Your Bristol’ project. ‘On The Move’ arises from a desire to work collaboratively with a more diverse grouping of Bristol residents and the realization that in order to do so the project needed to go mobile. As well as signalling the mobility of the project, ‘On The Move’ also signals our interest in mobility as a concept to be investigated. Through the project we ask two central questions on this theme:
1. How does mobility and longer histories of dwelling affect people’s senses of place?
2. How can the collection, interconnection and presentation of contemporary, crowd-sourced digital materials generate new understandings of history on the move?
To answer these questions we pursue four overlapping strategies:
1. Augmenting the existing Know Your Place Website: Much like initial phase of the project, this will involve working with groups to upload content to the Know Your Place map. The Know Your Place map forms part of the Historic Environment Record which city planners consult in order to help make planning decisions. Augmenting the map therefore forms one way in which people can have an effect on neighbourhood planning.
2. Know Your Bus: This is a bus fully equipped with the latest audio-visual archiving technologies. The bus will travel around the city offering a mobile space for people to come together to share and digitise artefacts, recount and record stories and access and update the Know Your Place map with the support of others who’ve used the map before.
3. Map Your Bristol: Similar to Know Your Place, Map Your Bristol will also be online digital map but a more flexible version. Map Your Bristol will be not be centrally moderated and will allow users to add multiple images, videos and text as well as to create whole new community layers allowing individuals and groups to map the city in whatever way they see fit. There will also be two mobile apps
4. Exploring Models of Community Co-production: Through the use of digital tools like the maps and apps and the public events and workshops that bring them to life, Know your Bristol creates spaces in which people can come together to co-produce knowledge about their city. This part of the project engages with this idea through a range of of events and activities with eight Bristol Community groups over the next eighteen months. See the ‘projects’ tab above for more information on the specific projects.
We are the neighbourhood group for the West Street area of Bedminster. We’ve just bought some audio recording equipment and have begun to record local people’s stories of the 50’s and 60’s, when West Street was a vibrant and busy high street serving the factories nearby – it is now only designated by the City Council as a ‘major transport route’, most of the shops have gone and the factories closed long ago. However, developers have taken over and the proliferation of apartment blocks has meant that the population in this area has grown 60% in the past 5 years compared to 13%for the rest of Bristol. In a recent residents’ survey, ‘a local history group’ was top of the list in the leisure section. We are making an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund to enable us to digitise the recordings and photographs we collect, and to mount the photographs in shop windows along the street during autumn 2014, using one empty shop for a 4 day weekend as a ‘pop up museum’ where people can come and see/hear what’s been collected and tell us their stories. Bristol Museums are supporting the project and will archive the materials. Pete Insole of Know Your Place is also working with us, and has wondered whether there is some way the Know your Bristol project might also become involved to enable KYP to use the audio materials. We’re using the shops as a non-threatening environment for people who would not normally enter a museum or gallery. Looking at what you do (for the first time), it would seem very appropriate to have you involved in some way – helping us to link to KYP, but also physically present during the pop up museum weekend. I hope you’re interested in exploring some ideas for collaboration.
Hi Stef, it’s great to hear about your project. I’ve flagged it up to the team and we’ll see if there’s anything we can do in terms of collaboration.
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