From the Grosvenor Museum’s collection: A child’s shoe – nearly 2000 years old – from Roman Chester

It’s been a while since I last posted, and the COVID19 pandemic has had a lot to do with that. Moving teaching online at very short notice was certainly a challenge, and the continuing problems and uncertainty have been difficult for everyone. That has inevitably had an effect on research activities; some have had to be postponed, while others have to be managed in completely new ways.

There has been some very good news, though, in the midst of all the anxiety and complexity. At the end of 2019, I met with Dr. Katherine Wilson from the Department of History & Archaeology, and Dr. Liz Montgomery from the Grosvenor Museum in Chester, to discuss putting together some funding bids to build on work they had already done on a project called ‘Mobility of Objects across Boundaries‘. That project was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and focused on objects within the museum’s huge collection which were connected with mobility in some way (e.g. pilgrim badges or shoes), or which are often associated strictly with one location or period in history, but which were actually used in a much wider variety of places and times. An important part of this project was making these objects – many of which have spent years in the museum’s vaults, and never been seen in public – available to the public, and especially to school children. Katherine, Liz, and other collaborators wanted to build on the foundations of that initial project, and to add digital representations of the objects – which is where I came in. In summer 2020, we completed two bid applications: one was an internal bid for University of Chester Knowledge Transfer funding, and the other was for a much larger bid for follow-on funding from the AHRC.

It’s very common to put a lot of work in on a bid application, and fail to get anything in return (except, perhaps, some useful feedback), as there are always far more applicants than funds available. We were therefore pleasantly surprised when we were awarded the internal funding we’d bid for in Autumn 2020, and even happier when we heard in December that we’d also been awarded a total of nearly £100,000 from the AHRC.

Katherine, Liz, and I have been working on the Knowledge Transfer project since October, along with colleagues from the university’s Informatics Centre, and one of our M.Sc. Advanced Computer Science students who is working part-time for us as a programmer. The AHRC project officially starts in Autumn 2021, and culminates in an exhibition at the Grosvenor Museum in Spring or Summer 2022. Hopefully by then most of the restrictions we’re currently under due to the pandemic will themselves be history, and the project teams will be able to have a long overdue celebratory meal out. (For many of us, that will be the first time we’ve actually met in person.) Meanwhile, we’re enjoying working on the Knowledge Transfer project, and looking forward to working the the AHRC project.

Early on in 2019, I gave a talk for our History & Archaeology department’s research seminar series. One of several results of that seminar was a meeting with Dr. Tim Grady (from H&A) and Matt Griffiths (of the Informatics Centre at Thornton) about ways of introducing digital skills into the History & Archaeology department’s Level 5 Experiential Learning module on practical archive research. We decided that focusing on using digital means for explaining and disseminating the students’ archive work would be a good idea, as this is increasingly a requirement in professional history and archaeology situations. We also decided that it would be unfair and unrealistic to try to teach the students programming or technical web development skills from scratch in five weeks, especially as it would only be a small part of the module. However, whether they become professional historians or archaeologists, or choose to go into other occupations after university, Tim’s students will almost certainly have to collaborate with digital specialists at some point in their careers, so we decided to focus on the knowledge and skills they would need to do this effectively – skills which will be highly transferable, and are less likely to be out of date in a couple of years than more technical topics.

History & Archaeology students taking part in a compressed Design Sprint

My input into the module delivery was a whistle-stop tour of the history of software development (including images and stories of early computers, which went down very well), an introduction to the theory of human-centred design and Design Sprints, and training on how to build a high fidelity prototype in PowerPoint. All of this took place at the Parkgate Road campus, where the History & Archaeology department is based. Tim and his team spent the rest of that week working with teams of students on three different archive research projects, starting to look into the histories of the Holocaust, the effects of the British Empire in Chester, and Chester Royal Infirmary. The following week, the students and their tutors travelled to Thornton Science Park to make use of our Design Suite facilities. I steered them through a highly compressed Design Sprint, where the teams started to design prototype mobile apps to disseminate their findings to the public. The teams then spent several weeks back at Parkgate Road with Tim and his colleagues from H&A, working with the archive material, and refining their app prototypes. As well as their academic reports, each team submitted a PowerPoint hi-fi prototype for their coursework assessment.

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  ‘Chester & the British Empire’

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  ‘The Chester Royal Infirmary’

Slides from PowerPoint hi-fi prototypes produced by History & Archaeology students

While it’s generally the case that teaching innovations are done with the best of intentions, you never really know how well they’ll work until they’ve actually been tried out with students, so it was a great relief to all concerned when the students took to the Design Sprint process like ducks to water, responded enthusiastically to the hi-fi prototype assessment requirement, and produced some excellent pieces of work. Apparently the head of the History & Archaeology department, Prof. Meggen Gondek, had been paying close attention, and was very pleased with the results, because she nominated us for a ‘Teaching Team of the Year’ Award from the university’s Learning & Teaching Institute, which we were fortunate enough to win. Added to the good results and transferable skills gained by the students, it was a successful module all round!

For about eighteen months now, I’ve been working with my department colleague Andy Davies, and Dr. Maeve Marmion from Chester Business School, on our overlapping areas of research, focusing on the intersections between Human-Centred Design, Immersive Experiences, Digital Heritage and Heritage Tourism.  We presented a poster at the 4th International AR and VR Conference at Manchester Metropolitan University in June 2018, based on our work earlier that year to test a shortened version of Jake Knapp’s Design Sprint methodology, using a digital heritage application as a case study.  The poster was well received, and we were asked to contribute a paper to the book of conference proceedings.  Since last year, we’ve been busy developing a number of related Digital Heritage projects, based on some of the sites mentioned in the poster, and also some others in the Chester area.  More on these very soon!

Our poster for the 4th International AR and VR Conference at MMU, June 2018