During the last three decades, research on the Old Poor Law (1601-1834) has reinvented our understanding of that institution. This discretionary welfare system gave most people a right to apply for support but no right to receive it, and practice could vary wildly between communities. Older notions that the economic position of the individual parishes that administered welfare dictated who got what, have given way to an acknowledgement that a complex configuration of custom, the personality of individual officials, residual models of philanthropy and humanitarianism and the exact constellation of local poverty, dictated much in policy terms. One of the most exciting aspects of this reinterpretation has been the rediscovery in large numbers of pauper voices (in the form of pauper letters seeking relief) and pauper agency, such that we now understand that paupers were not the passive subjects of the poor law but had the space, rhetoric and confidence to negotiate their place in it. Set against this backdrop, and notwithstanding the work of Hurren, Green and Hooker, the historiography of the New Poor Law has moved on remarkably little since the work of Anne Crowther in the early 1980s. Excepting David Green's work on London or that of King on Bolton, published micro-studies of individual unions have been rare and comparative studies still rarer. We thus still think of the 1834-45 period, during which most parishes were combined into the New Poor Law unions that dispensed welfare, as marking a definitive change in the nature, organisation, intent and outcome of English and Welsh welfare. A discretionary system was replaced by one that combined central direction and control with residual local decision-making and entirely local finance. The leitmotif of this new system was the workhouse and the ebb and flow of attempts to control and at times deny the outdoor relief that had underpinned the Old Poor Law. The dominant chronological narrative has been one in which the so-called crusade against outdoor relief in the 1870s and 1880s marks the final attempt to impose the New Poor Law as its 1834 architects intended. Failure led to the progressive narrowing of its scope, such that the coming of local democracy in the 1890s and the Liberal Welfare Reforms of the early twentieth century in effect ripped away the original foundations. Above all, the pauper was subject to this system, and a second leitmotif has been the coercion of paupers and the rise of the poor law scandal. Their voices, it has been assumed, were largely extinguished. Our project challenges this broad representation. In two pilot projects investigating The National Archives collection MH12 we have found that the pauper voice was not muted and pauper agency was not quashed. Paupers and their advocates continued to write to local officers to try and negotiate relief but the arrival of central authority and oversight offered a new route for the exercise of the pauper voice in the form of letters to London-based officials. In this more developed project we want to undertake a systematic sampling (see CFS) of this vast collection. We will locate and transcribe an estimated 11,000 of these letters, making those transcripts available to the academic/non-academic community. Having transcribed them we will develop new methodological tools (see CFS) for classifying and understanding this corpus, rules which will draw on and be relevant to the considerable range of disciplines which have been concerned with so-called ego documents or more accurately ordinary writing. Our analysis of this material will be driven by key questions centring on the degree to which paupers had agency and used it to negotiate their relief in a system to which they had previously merely been thought subject. Drawing comparative lessons from the pre-1834 period we will offer a New Poor Law history from below, as well as keying into wider debates about literacy, the nature of state power and the class.

The Prize Papers are a vast, unique and serendipitous collection held by The National Archives (TNA): time-capsules of daily life in the Early Modern period referencing people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds across the globe. The collection is the result of prize-taking (or the legal capturing of enemy ships) by English privateers and warships during the various European wars between 1652 and 1815. To claim a legal capture and distinguish themselves from mere pirates, seafarers had to confiscate every scrap of paper aboard and take it to the High Court of Admiralty in London, which over the centuries accumulated a huge archive of undelivered letters, trade and maritime documents, colonial administration papers, notebooks and travel journals. Furthermore, the collection holds a range of artefacts, including small objects enclosed in letters (jewellery, buttons, ribbons, embroidered fabrics) which offer a unique opportunity for materiality research and public engagement. We propose a project that uses TNA's CapCo-funded equipment to develop innovative ways of analysing the material make-up of objects in the Prize Papers collection, to better understand their production and use and to support their conservation and preservation. Critically, we propose approaching this task through engagement with communities with a connection to the cultural origins of the objects under investigation. The project will focus on a captivating object as a case study: the wallet of Jan Bekker Teerlink, the supercargo on the Prussian ship Henriette returning from China to Europe with a cargo of tea, which was captured en route off the Dutch coast on 31 May 1803. The contents of his wallet include notes in Dutch and Chinese, a lock of dark hair, seeds from South Africa and a set of vividly dyed samples of Chinese silk and Indian chintz. Researchers in Heritage Science and Conservation will develop, test and apply non/micro-invasive methods to analyse the textile samples using the analytical and imaging suite that include CapCo-funded instruments (TNA's multispectral imaging system and Raman microscope, Victoria and Albert Museum's (VAM) Hirox 3D digital microscope). With the support and expertise of our partner network, we hope to gain insight into the production context of the textiles, the condition of the substrate and dyes, and their vulnerability to light and other environmental factors. Comparative studies of the patterns and materials of Chinese and Indian garments from the same period held in other collections (such as the VAM) will follow, in an attempt to contextualise the fabric samples found in the Prize Papers. The project will also consolidate beneficial collaborations between TNA and researchers developing new methods for the micro or non-invasive analysis of textile dyes at Nottingham Trent University and the University of Milan, who are keen to apply their developments beyond mock-up samples in laboratory conditions, optimising them for historic samples. An integral part of every stage of the research will be an ongoing comprehensive public engagement programme: from community-sourcing translators for the documents in the wallet, learning from Chinese and Indian communities in the UK about their understanding of their histories and including their knowledge of the tradition of textile making in Asia, to hands-on textile dyeing and printing workshops for families in those communities and a Maker in Residence programme.

Couched in a network of research initiatives under the umbrella theme 'Towards a National Collection: Opening UK Heritage to the World', the Deep Discoveries project aims to contribute to the creation of a unified national heritage collection by creating a transformative image searching platform. Our goal is to design a prototype app enabling cross-collection image linking by harnessing the ability of computer vision and deep learning methods to identify and recognise specific patterns without the need for preliminary integrated descriptive metadata. The project aims to create a radical shift in content discovery within and between our nation's digitised image repositories, allowing users the opportunity to dissolve established physical and virtual barriers between these collections, opening cross-disciplinary modes of research and engagement and generating new and unforeseen connections leading to user-generated, disruptive, and (re)defined notions of 'national' heritage. Through employing the catalytic potential of ever more socially-integrated artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for the benefit of opening up our national heritage collections and radically diversifying our visitor base, the project will ensure that these tools are directed toward the enhancement of the heritage economy and the wider social good. Crucially, the nature of deep learning architectures future-proofs the search platform, as it will be able to evolve and improve as the underpinning dataset grows. If successful, the creation of an image search platform able to continuously integrate new digital image repositories as they are generated by GLAM-sector organisations will have enormous benefits in making collections networked and openly discoverable across our virtual heritage landscape. Such an advancement will demonstrate the UK's commitment to cutting-edge technologies and shift the view of the museum/archive from a historical repository to a space of dynamic and emergent practices, inviting diverse users to weave new narratives from our collections. To achieve our ambitious goals, we have formed a cross-disciplinary network of diverse institutional partners: the core team is formed by researchers from the University of Surrey's Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing, the Collection Care and Research departments of The National Archives, the Royal Botanical Gardens Edinburgh, and the V&A Research Institute. We are also joined by three Project Partners who will support the project through offering access to parts of their digitised image collections. Our partners include Gainsborough Weaving Studio, the Sanderson Design Archive, and the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture. We will work together through a series of workshops, some of which will be jointly held with other projects from the Towards a National Collection programme. By surveying the current landscape of digital image users and working with a variety of stakeholders (public, academic, institutional) we will work to iteratively design a visual search platform that truly Opens up UK Heritage to the World.

This fellowship will pioneer interdisciplinary understanding of the impact of digital change on the cultural memory practices and the 'official' record of the British Army's unit operational reports ('war diaries') through comparative research over two archival sites: the Ministry of Defence, Whitehall and The National Archives (TNA). Military units document and record their activities in theatre (active combat) by keeping war diaries. War diaries are official records that (i) capture information to be used at a later time by the military to improve training and tactics, and (ii) establish a comprehensive record of a unit's activities to enable future historical research. The CMU's key work includes: improving operational record keeping (i.e. collecting, organising, and archiving active war diaries); developing and maintaining briefing documents to support current operations; working with treasury solicitors and others in compensation claims, and providing documents for public inquiries. TNA is the UK government's official archive. It contains over 1,000 years of history. Staff at the National Archives give detailed guidance to government departments and the public sector on information management and advise others about the care of historical archives. This work pioneers a a cultural memory studies' approach which sees memory as cultural and social practices which orient persons to possible versions of the past in such a way as to make them relevant to ongoing personal, institutional and political concerns. This approach will be applied to the first ever ethnography of the British Army's Corporate Memory Unit (CMU) in the MOD, Whitehall, London after securing unprecedented access. This crucially enables the project to uniquely interrogate the connections and disconnections across and between the often publicly accessible features of the new war ecology (public archives, TNA) and the relatively hidden military organizational knowledge production and management (MOD). This fellowship will examine how the advent of highly mobile digital images and recordings from the frontline presents an unprecedented challenge to the organizational memory of the Army constructed in the context of over a century of maintaining unit war diaries, and what this transformation could mean for changes in the forms of knowledge about war, for the military, archivists, historians and publics. The impetus for this fellowship is the 21st century Western-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being embedded in the 'connective turn' (Hoskins 2010, 2011). This is the massively increased scale, volume and complexity of digital/digitized information that shape a new knowledge base - an 'information infrastructure ' (Bowker and Star 2000) through which wars are planned, fought, historicised, and (de)legitimised. In this period, Government electronic record keeping systems have eclipsed previous paper-based systems, which 'has been accompanied both by a marked deterioration in record keeping practices and the use of record keeping to enable an audit culture' (Moss 2012: 860). Specifically, the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars mark the evolution of the MOD organizational memory system from paper to digital. Although the organization was using computers in 2001, it was still operating a paper system, i.e. printing out work and placing in paper files. This compares with the 300 million digital files from operations in Iraq it has to manage today.

The National Archives (TNA) is the official archive and publisher for the UK Government, and for England and Wales. Our mission is to collect and preserve the record, to use our expertise and knowledge to connect people with their history, and to lead, partner and support archives at home and worldwide in developing a sustainable and innovative practice. Ensuring archival collections are available for access is TNA's foundational mandate and our growing programme is a key component of this mission. TNA is unique in the UK GLAM sector as an archive with a recognised HSCR team and an established laboratory. We are driven by developing the vast potential of heritage science and conservation research within and of the archive, and of serving our community through collaboration and knowledge advancement. As the archives sector leadership body for England and Wales, we have deep insight into the research trends and needs of our community and can provide advice and guidance, access to technical expertise and analytical services, and develop a rich and diverse ecosystem of knowledge-exchange and partnerships. Over the past five years, we have created and implemented workflows that enable rapid, efficient, and generous access to our expertise and equipment. These include (1) travelling with our equipment off-site to support research in organisations that lack capacity and capability, (2) hosting researchers and their equipment at TNA to analyse our records, (3) travelling with our collection items off-site for analyses elsewhere, and (4) hosting collections from other institutions at TNA for on-site analysis. Through a flexible assessment structure for Sampling Requests and a tiered fee structure for access to our equipment and expertise, we have been able to meet and expand demand for collaborative HSCR. These developments have demonstrated the need and growing demand for innovative research in archives and libraries. Our laboratory was not purpose-built to accommodate analytical and imaging equipment, nor for teaching and engagement activities. Our staff capacity is also insufficient to meet the demand from the sector for individual analyses and short-term collaborative research projects. With this proposal to RICHeS, we are requesting funds to Upgrade our HSCR facilities: extend the analytical laboratory to accommodate existing and newly acquired equipment; modernise the dry/teaching laboratory; enlarge our strong-room facilities to accommodate incoming collection materials for analysis Acquire analytical and imaging equipment to complete and complement our existing research capability: Hyperspectral Imaging System, Scanning X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometer Create one heritage scientist post to coordinate and grow archives and libraries sector engagement with RICHeS through training and knowledge exchange, deliver access to our services, and monitor the impact of our activities Our ambition is to serve the broader HSCR community and to become an integral partner within a cohesive and coherent national infrastructure for our sector. As archives sector lead, we plan to expand access across the archive and library landscape in the UK and abroad by capitalising on our extensive network of partnerships. Our laboratory will promote challenge-led research to address topics relevant to book, paper, parchment, photograph, and textile conservation, and that are transferrable to collections well beyond our own. In tandem with our Project Partners, we will provide complementary access and training and support smaller organisations as we move towards sustainable, impactful, and ethical care for our national holdings.