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Memories Materialised: a public online oral history environment

Led by Dr Simon Grennan (Research Fellow in Fine Art) during 2011 and 2012, the international project team included two academic researchers (Grennan and co-author Christopher Sperandio, Associate Professor of Fine Art at Rice University, Houston, Texas) and community development staff from Great Places Housing Group. ‘Memories Materialised’ examined the 50-year-old memories of the people who lived on a half-mile stretch of Stockport Road in Manchester from 1963. It resulted in a public access online ‘walkthrough’ database of memories and a publication distributed in an edition of 3000.

Grennan and the team undertook two research projects in the Levenshulme, Longsite and Hulme areas of Manchester. The first involved three studies of the attitudes of 50 people, aged between 14 and 20, to a range of accepted oral history research practices. The second involved three more studies of 30 older people, aged 60+, and their recollections of particular locations, people and events.

Indications from these studies were used to hypothesise new models of oral history data collection and data presentation. Traditionally, a trained interviewer directs the subject and constructs the interviewer’s neutrality relative to the topics in view. The interviewee’s testimony is approached as a primary source of information. In this model, it is rare to bring interviewees together to discuss memories or to consider the ways in which memories themselves develop.

However, with ‘Memories Materialised’, the model of data collection encouraged interrogation of memory itself, rather than default to documented facts, allowing contradiction, dissent and opinion to come to the fore. This approach provided the basis for the new model of data presentation in an online environment in which a schematic map, a searchable location archive and a virtual walk-through present representations of the subjects’ recollections.