Oral History Archives and the Spatial Turn

Examples from Manchester's Migrant Histories

Laurence Brown & Kofi OwusuSchool of Arts, Histories & Cultures

University of Manchester

1. Mapping migrant cultures in Manchester, 1880-2000

2. Connecting existing collections3. Participatory GIS and the creation

of new oral history collections4. Visualisation and the dynamic

archive

Mapping Migrant Cultures in Manchester, 1880-2000

• Developing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as an analytical tool for migration research:

• Connecting individual experiences / aggregate data• Exploring relationships between migrant contact zones

and changing socio-economic environment• Engaging migrant and school groups

• Visualising physical routes of emigration to understand relationship between divergent migrant flows.

• Reconceptualising migrant identities through the spatial analysis of the mobility and fluid interactions that formed networks of settlement, rather than fixed by census residence

• Comparison of spatial and temporal change in the significant sites of interaction for migrants in industrial and post-industrial Manchester

Project Outline • Comparing Jewish migrants

(1880-1940) and Caribbean migrants (1940-2000):

• Significant cultural sites –

including religious institutions, home associations and other spaces remembered by migrants as defining their identity

• “Itineraries of the everyday” – the daily routes of work, leisure and consumption, such as grocery shops or African hairdressers

• Historical events – sites of interaction, conflict or cultural practice within the diaspora and/or the wider community revealed at specific moments in time

• Socio-economic data – drawn from census studies, newspapers and oral testimonies on material conditions.

Existing oral history collections on migration in Manchester• Manchester Jewish Museum

• Over three hundred interviews collected in the late 1970s and 1980s, many with the children of immigrants who arrived in Manchester 1880-1914

• Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre• Dozens of interviews recorded with Afro-Caribbean

migrants in the 1980s and 2005

• Unique historical sources but limited public access to tapes and transcripts

• GIS enables connections and comparison between fragmented and discreet collections

Comparing sites of Jewish emigration from Lithuania to Manchester, 1880-1914

Networks of Settlement by Lithuanian Jews in Manchester, 1880-1918

Connecting existing collections

• Geo-code existing oral, textual, visual sources

• Explore relationship between qualitative and quantitative data

• Visualise relationship between individual and aggregate experiences

Participatory GIS and the creation of new oral history collections

• Projects mapping indigenous spatial knowledge in Australia and Canada have sought to use GIS to recover indigenous cultural landscapes which have then been used by indigenous communities to make economic and political claims

• Byrne and Nugent construct “geo-biographies” through a series of interviews with Aboriginal Australians to construct personalized maps that located cultural sites, practices and experiences with real-world geographic co-ordinates.

Byrne and Nugent, Mapping Attachment (2004)• The advantage of GIS for this type of

mapping project is that information about the landscape can be provided on an individualized basis as well as compositely. The layering of spatial information that GIS allows ensures that each person’s landscape remains discrete. Yet, at the same time, GIS has the capability to show a series of individualized layers simultaneously, revealing where in the landscape individual lives merge

Moss Side

Manchester

(1955)

• male, aged 35 from Nevis

• African, Indian and Caribbean landlords

• female, aged 20 from St Kitts

• Family friends and church assistance

Visualisation and the dynamic archive• GIS provide flexible platform for visualisation

• Can be modified by subsequent interviews, findings, new sources

• Web access provide new means of gathering migrant testimony / feedback

• Visualisation enable collaborative research with community partners through multiple versions of the same data

Visualising Cultural Sites using Google Sketchup