The Movie of the Archive? Showing and Sharing a Study of Young Lives (Over Time)

This paper provides a case study in democratizing the archive: where researchers lead a process of constructing, sharing and teaching from a major social science research project. Inventing Adulthoods is a study that followed approx. 100 young people as they grew from their early teens to their 20s in five socially diverse areas of England and Northern Ireland between 1996 and 2006. A rich and unique window on life for the young at the turn of the century, this substantial qualitative longitudinal dataset is slowly being archived by the original researchers involved. The team has drawn creatively on the technical resources available to them in order to represent and share the dataset, creating a website providing detailed documentation of the study, a dvd -Rom that forms part of an Open University course on 'Youth', and a showcase digital archive. In the paper we focus on the process of creating the DVD-Rom with the Open University in order to discuss some of the important issues arising from attempts to democratize and share such material including renegotiating consent in order to break with previously-agreed confidentiality and privacy; the role of the visual in representing a largely textual dataset; working with other professions with different ethical codes and approaches to data ownership (publishers, filmmakers); and the different kinds of interpretation and story telling involved. This discussion lends important insight into the shifting nature of both the archive and the relationship between the archive and academia wrought by the digital revolution.