Hello there and welcome to our first blog post! Olly, Dan, Jade and myself, Melissa are a team of four students currently undertaking our final year of Public History studies at Bournemouth University. As part of one of our units we have been asked to create a series of historical outputs for the Dorset History Centre. Our work will focus on the Bankes archive, and we hope that we will be able to not only support DHC but help sustain the great public interest in the Bankes family archive created in the last three years by the Unlocking the Bankes Archive project.
We will be listening to and analysing 25 oral history interviews collected recently in three areas of interest to the Bankes family, namely Kingston Lacy, Studland and Corfe Castle. After analysing these interviews we will be creating unique and engaging outputs which will include a sound event, a journal article to be included in the Oral History Journal, tweets and many more. Our goal is to enhance this rich history through deep engagement with the resources available in the Bankes archive and transform this into accessible content for the general public.
The interviews offer an insight into how life has changed on the Bankes estate, and we are keen to explore developments and make connections between local history and social history. Our prospective sound event will be an interactive and digestible way to let the public connect with the Bankes archive, as well as learning more about local history and oral history.
Social media will be a particularly useful tool for growing our outreach and gaining a new audience. Our Twitter and History Pin content will make historical content shorter, snappier and more relevant to the modern age. This will act as a preview for what can be discovered if you explore the Bankes Archive further. Consequently, our outputs are interconnected and designed to boost each other, and build an interest in our project. This will ultimately secure us the wider audience that we are hoping to attain.
Keep your eyes peeled for our future blog posts! These will concern the progression and development of our project. We are also keen to share thought provoking and interesting extracts from the oral history interviews. Watch this space!