The first half of January was, for me, a very productive start of the year. The time spent with family and friends over Christmas allowed me to recharge my energies but also to reflect on the learnings from this first year in the project. As Research Fellow for the textile strand, I had the opportunity to be actively involved in all the project activities throughout the year, and my main proposition for the starting of 2023 was to allocate time every week to document my reflections not only from current, but also from previous work. In December we supported Arran in updating our new documentation space on Notion, and this has been my first task for the starting week of the year.

Before Christmas I had updated the dataset of datasets section, describing all the data collected during the textile pilot and the investigations I was involved. After the break I continued this work, by reordering my dataset folders in order for them to be uploaded on Box, the new storage space. Before sharing this data with Arran, I added in each folder a Readme file, which describes the rational and structure behind the collection (and creation) of each dataset. In the first textile pilot, the process of data collection was guided by a thematic focus (Saltaire and Lister Mill), and I thought it was important to specify, for each collection we worked with, the search criteria, the data format and additional information on data transformation. I also started to draft a section related to the first experiment on Omeka, in order to document this preliminary phase and reflect on what we learnt from uploading data on an aggregative platform and linking different types of sources together. I will continue working on this over the next week.

Over the last week, I also had the opportunity to work on a new investigation proposal together with Daniel Belteki. We would like to explore the challenges in collecting folk songs and connecting them to mining and textile collections. This line of investigation emerged during the textile pilot, and we started discussing potential research questions during the workshop in Manchester last October, involving the singing historian Jennifer Reid. Within the digital turn of the project in December, I focused on the Oral History investigation and on framing the collaboration with the University of Leicester for the technical pipeline, but one of my propositions after Christmas was to document these early reflections on folk songs, and to frame a cross-strand investigation with Daniel Belteki, who also wanted to work on this and had started to map potential sources for miners’ songs. Over the last week Daniel and I had a series of very inspiring and productive conversations and worked together on the investigation template, which we are keen to discuss in the next Investigation Meeting.

Another personal proposition for 2023 is to explore opportunities to disseminate the experiments and preliminary findings from the project. In November Anna Maria, Arran and I worked on a presentation proposal for the next DH23 Conference in July in Graz and over Christmas we have received a first feedback from four reviewers (the first three were rather positive, the fourth was asking for clarifications, which we have sent this week). In the last couple of days, I also came across a fascinating call for proposals launched by De Monfort University. The School of Fashion and Textiles and the Faculty of Arts, Design and Humanities is organizing a one-day symposium in April to reflect on innovative approaches in object biographies and people’s narratives in the field of fashion and textiles. I feel this would be a wonderful context to present the work we are doing around workers’ stories in the Oral History investigation, but also that it would be a great opportunity to build a call to action on Yarn starting from the focus of the symposium: personal stories attached to garments and clothes. I will be discussing this opportunity with Simon next week, while working on a proposal and object biography for the Symposium.