Collaboration in, collaboration out: the eighties in the age of digital reproduction

In this article I will bring together the practical, pedagogical and theoretical implications of a relatively small digitisation project, ‘Observing the 80s’, in order to explore the ways in which ‘the digital’ might transform historical practice. In it I will outline a process of collaboration, juxtaposition and engagement with the “unknown” in a higher education context that is increasingly quantified and goals-orientated. There is a well established literature on the digital’s potential for transforming historical practice, as well as a growing set of literature that tries to bring together the pedagogical and researcher sides of our academic identities. I seek to address both of these lines of discussion through a focus on the collaborative possibilities enabled by the Observing the 80s project based at the University of Sussex. At every stage of the project’s production, content and useage rather than finding quantifiable isolated benefits, or indeed problems, of digitisation, we found an ongoing process of negotiation between the designed for, and the pragmatic and unknowable.