Adventures in tagging: local history in East London

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to describe the development of an online project in East London about local history.

Design/methodology/approach

The approach to the paper has been to combine the experience of building and developing a live online community of practice (around the subject of local history in East London) with both established historical theory and the emergence of self‐publishing “history from below”.

Findings

The project has revealed that the classification of history at a local level requires a detailed understanding of the theory of history, issues about classification of history, and the need to create a classification scheme that is usable in the context of user‐generated content.

Originality/value

The online project has been live for around 18 months. In this time, over 440 people have contributed almost 5,000 original posts. They have created a strong online community presence and there has been work to classify the contributions by professional and amateur historians and local people who are recording their personal memories.

Citation

Budzak, D. (2010), "Adventures in tagging: local history in East London", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 62 No. 4/5, pp. 502-513. https://doi.org/10.1108/00012531011074735