It’s time to share a newly completed evaluation report!
The fascinating and complicated Dialect & Heritage project was led by Professor Fiona Douglas of the University of Leeds and delivered in partnership with the Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings, Worcestershire; the Dales Countryside Museum and Ryedale Folk Museum in North Yorkshire; the Food Museum in Suffolk; and the Weald & Downland Living Museum, East Sussex.
The aims of the project were threefold:
- to digitise 40,000 items in the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC), enhance the online catalogue and make the collection more accessible to researchers around the world.
- to share ‘this vital aspect of our heritage’ with communities across England, connecting contemporary audiences with the dialect and speech of their ancestors.
- to invite a diverse range of people to take part in the Great Big Dialect Hunt survey or to work with specially trained volunteers to contribute 132 Oral Histories to the collection.
Each museum hosted an Engagement Officer from 2021 to 2022 who coordinated activity in the surrounding communities, encouraged people to respond to the Great Big Dialect Hunt survey and recruited and trained volunteers to record new oral histories for the collection.
A sixth partner, North Yorkshire Libraries, emerged in 2022 and the project team supported the service to take the project to a further 41 community libraries across the Yorkshire Moors and Dales.
Supported by a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, project work began in 2019 and within 6 months ran into the challenges posed by the Covid-19 lockdowns. Fortunately the first phase of delivery was to enhance the catalogues of the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture and digitise the items from the Survey of English Dialects. This meant that after the briefest pause, the Collections team found a way to get on with the work in preparation for the next stage: an 18 month programme of public engagement activity in rural communities across Yorkshire, the West Midlands, East Anglia and the South East.
Between January 2020 and December 2023, the project partners delivered:
- 256 events in 144 venues across England attended in person or online by 14,824+ participants.
- 12 exhibitions, visited by 127,272+ people over for 2,153 days.
- A new website featuring 268+ pieces of content.
- Training for 137 newly recruited volunteers who contributed 2,918 volunteer hours, valued at £167,950 to the project delivery
They documented and digitised:
- 5,085 documents from the LAVC (34,035 individual items).
- 10,0693 responses to the Big Dialect Survey.
- 132 new oral histories.
Although Professor Douglas already had experience of dialect-focussed public engagement work through an earlier partnership with Dales Countryside Museum, this project was far bigger in scope. As part of the evaluation process I was asked to research the developmental impact on the project delivery team in the School of English and on the University Special Collections team as well as on the partner organisations.
It was a lovely project which had a strong inter-generational appeal. It differed from other heritage projects I’ve evaluated because it focused on the intangible heritage of dialect: how it’s used, how it’s changed and how it’s moved around the country. I enjoyed watching event participants sit down together to fill in the Great Big Dialect Hunt Survey over a cup of tea. Within minutes there would be heated debate about how to pronounce ‘scone’ or what words people used for ‘seesaw’. And laughter! Lots of laughter.
If you want to have a go at the Great Big Dialect Hunt, you can complete the survey here.
Full details of the project activity, the artworks created and the early findings from the Great Big Dialect Hunt Survey can be found here.
And here’s the report: