What do sex and relationships mean to you: The Reanimating Data project

They are often destroyed, or stored away in boxes in the homes of researchers. A precious few find their way into public archives. But is it possible that these ‘data’ might return to the communities that generated them and create new value?

The Reanimating Data project tries to make this happen. Saving, digitising and sharing a classic social science research project (WRAP) which collected indepth interviews with young women aged between 16-21 in 1989 about love, romance and sex in the shadow of HIV/AIDS. Thirty years later, the research team has liberated interviews from the archive, sharing with groups of contemporary young women who have used creative methods to bring these materials back to life. One ‘experiment’ involved working with the Women’s Theatre Society at the University of Manchester who were inspired by the stories of drama students in 1989 to make an original piece of theatre – weaving together stories from the past and the present. The WRAP data set is now available as a public open access archive, which expands to include the new documents co-produced with new users. The archive is being used by researchers, teachers, youth workers, artists. Join us in telling new stories from old.

The Reanimating Data project is funded by the ESRC’s Transformational Social Research programme. The Sussex team includes Rachel Thomson, Ester McGeeney and Rosie Gahnstrom from the Department of Social Work & Social Care, and Sharon Webb in History. Niamh Moore is a researcher from the University of Edinburgh, and all work with the community Archive project 'Feminist Webs'.

The project has been supported by the Sussex Humanities Lab, including contributions from Dave Banks and Alex Peverett.