Latest news

Living Through the Blitz by Tom Harrisson

Living Through the Blitz by Tom Harrisson has been republished by the print on demand service, Faber Finds.

Published posthumously in 1976, Living through the Blitz uses material collected by Mass Observation to explore people’s experiences on the British home front during the Second World War and gives first-hand accounts recorded by people as they lived through the Blitz. The book is avalible to buy on Faber’s website.   

Mass Observation Communities Online

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Mass Observation Communities Online (MOCO) website.

On the website, community groups from across the country are invited to get inspired by Mass Observation techniques and material in order to develop and extend their own community archives.

MOCO is hosting a series of free workshops for participating groups. The next workshop is held on 8th July at the University of Sussex.

This introductory workshop will be held in the Special Collections department of the University Library. This is where the Mass Observation Archive is housed. Fiona Courage, Special Collections Manager and Dorothy Sheridan, Director of the Mass Observation Project, will be giving presentations at the workshop.

If you are interested to find out more, or if you would like your community group to get involved please e-mail MOCO.

MOCO is JISC funded partnership between the Mass Observation Archive, the Centre for Community Engagement at the University of Sussex, Adam Matthew Digital and Bolton Museum and Archives.

12th May 2010

On 12th May 2010 the Mass Observation Archive repeated the 1937 call for people from all parts of the UK to record, in a diary, everything that they did on 12th May.

The 12th May 1937 was the day of George VI’s Coronation and many people wrote about being involved in this national event. Seventy three years later, we expected 12th May to be a very ordinary day. As it happened it was the first day of the new coalition government and the resulting diaries provide a glimpse into the everyday lives of a broad range
of people on this date.

Inspired by the 1937 diaries, the Brighton Festival invited Margaret Drabble, Philippe Sands, and Oona King to keep track of their 12th May. Their diaries were then read out at an event at the Pavilion Theatre in Brighton on the 23rd May 2010. These diaries are now stored in the Archive along with the other submissions.

The diaries are care for as part of the Mass Observation Archive in the Special Collections department at the University of Sussex and are available for research. Extracts from the diaries will be published on this website shortly.

MO Exhibition: 'Understanding Everyday Life'

What does it mean to research everyday life? What
does it mean to be researched? These are some of the questions explored in an exhibition about Mass Observation at the Jubilee Library in Brighton. The display includes side-by-side statements from current
MO correspondents and researchers on ways of understanding Mass Observation material.

The exhibition has been organised as part of the
University of Brighton’s Methodological Innovations
project and coincides with the Brighton Fringe Festival.
For more details visit the Fringe Festival’s website.

Jisc funding for the MOA

The Mass Observation Archive has made a successful bid to JISC under their Community and Business Engagement Grant for a six month project led by the University of Sussex's Centre for Community Engagement.

The project is called Mass Observation Communities Online (MOCO). It aims to create an online resource which will inspire and assist people to record the changing history of their communities. You can read more about the project here.

New Bulletin Published

The spring 2010 Bulletin is now ready to download here.

@MassObsArchive

The Mass Observation Archive is on Twitter. Keep up-to-date with our latest news by following us.

MO at the Brighton Festival

The Brighton Festival has invited Margaret Drabble, Philippe Sands, and Oona King to keep track of 24 hours in a MO style day diary. To join them as they share the diaries and observations please contact the Brighton festival box office

Social History Society Annual Conference 2010

There will be a session at the Social History Society annual conference next week in Glasgow on Mass Observation. The session will be chaired by Dorothy Sheridan.

Hilary Young (Open University): "Mass Observation and children's experiences of reading in the 1940s and 1950s" working across the phases". Hilary is using the replies to the Autumn 2003 Directive on people's memories of their reading as children together with earlier MO material.

Penny Summerfield (Manchester University): "The long ago war looms large in my life: men, women and the cultural memory of the Second World War, a Mass Observation Study". Penny is using the replies to the Spring 2009 Directive on images/memories of the Second World War.

Anne-Marie Kramer (Warwick University): "The Family History boom and identity: from bloodlines and status distinctions to 'hidden histories' and the archive as 'dream space' ". Anne-Marie is using the replies to the Summer 2008 Directive on doing Family History.

Patricia Cattley (Sussex University): "Mass Observation and memories of the relationship between aunts and nephews from 1914-2000". Patricia is drawing on three sets of directive replies: Relatives, friends and neighbours (Winter 1984), Growing up (Spring 1993) and My Family (Autumn 2000).

For more information about the conference please visit the Social History Society website.

Nine Wartime Lives

Nine Wartime Lives by James Hinton (Oxford University Press) is the latest book to be published using diaries kept for Mass Observation during the Second World War. The book is available to buy here.

Engaging Mass Observation

12 May 2010, Jubilee Library, Brighton

The 'Engaging Mass Observation' conference and exhibition marks the
final event in a year-long University of Brighton-funded collaborative research project: Methodological Innovations: Using Mass Observation. Focusing on the post-1981 Mass Observation material, the conference will explore new approaches for using and interpreting the collection. For more information about the conference and exhibition please click here.

A new Trustee for the Mass Observation Archive

The Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive have welcomed Jeremy Crow to the Trustee board. Jeremy is Head of Literary Estates at the Society of Authors, which acts as the literary representative for the estates of a number of distinguished writers. Jeremy joined the Trustees at their last meeting in January.   

Dear Diary....

Towards the end of 2009 the Mass Observation Archive helped the BBC with a programme about diary writing. As part of the production, Victoria Wood and Rory Bremner visited the Archive and were filmed looking at some wartime Mass Observation diaries. The programme is the third part in a series called "Dear Diary" and will be broadcast on BBC 4 on Monday 18th January. After the broadcast, it will be available on the BBC's iplayer service for one week. More details about the programme can be found here.

Women, War and Remembrance

Dorothy Sheridan (Director of the Mass Observation Project) will be delivering a paper at the Women, War and Remembrance conference at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire on 13th March. More information about the conference can be downloaded here.

Family Britain, 1951-1957 by David Kynaston

Following on from the acclaimed Austerity Britain, David Kynaston’s latest publication uses personal writing (including material from the Mass Observation Archive) to create a vivid, but unsentimental, picture of what every day life was like for British society as it moved away from the painful hardships of the post war period and into the 1950s. Family Britain is published by Bloomsbury and available to buy here.

Recording Leisure Lives: holidays and tourism in 20th century Britain

Drawing its inspiration from Humphrey Spender's Mass Observation photographs of Blackpool, this conference focuses on the leisure experiences of people on holiday in twentieth century Britain.

The conference organisers welcome proposals (max. 300 words) for papers of  twenty minutes that address any aspect of holidays and tourism under one or more of the conference sub-themes:

-Home and away: constructing the 'tourist gaze'
-Cities, the seaside and the spaces of tourism
-Weekends, wakes and bank holidays: domestic tourism in C20th Britain
-Holidaying in the past: heritage as tourism
-Researching holidays as leisure experiences
-Snapshots, records and archives: representations of holidays and tourism

For more information about the conference visit the University of Bolton's webpage

Please submit proposals to Dr Robert Snape by Friday 15th January 2010.

The 7th Biennial International Auto/biography Association Conference at the University of Sussex, 29 June-2 July 2010

The International Auto/biography Association (IABA) was created at Peking University in 1999. Since then, it has held six major international conferences in Asia, North America, Australia and Europe. The next conference will be the first in the UK. The Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex is inviting scholars, life writers and life historians to join in a global dialogue on life writing.For move information and details of how to submit a paper to the conference please contact the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research