19 Dec

A meeting on method

Liverpool-Central-Library-Interior-Cofeley-fmj-june-13Yesterday the Splendid Things team met with our Heritage Consultant to put the finishing touches to our research methodology (basically, the way we are going to do the research stage of the project). Our original idea was to use the British Newspaper archive and Liverpool Central Library’s micro-film newspaper archives to search for and log all stories from within any Liverpool-based newspaper that mentioned the word ‘Toxteth’, focusing on the years 1850 – 1900. Yet, some of our initial testing of this method raised some issues – most significantly, that the data this would uncover would be an unmanageable amount for our 18-month project. So it was back to the drawing board – how do we go about doing our research?

After looking at a range of options, the team decided that the best way to create a manageable data set  was to limit the number of newspapers we would look at. During the decades our project examines – 1850 to 1900 – three main Liverpool-based publications were in circulation; Liverpool Mercury, Liverpool Echo and Liverpool Daily Post. Of all of these newspapers the Liverpool Mercury was the most prolific at the time and has had a number of other researchers examine it. The Liverpool Mercury however, is less well-known with contemporary audiences. Therefore the team decided that our focus was be the Liverpool Echo and Liverpool Daily Post because of the following reasons:

  • Both newspapers were born out of the abolition of newspaper stamp duty that occurred in 1855.
  • The number of publications released by both of these newspapers provided a manageable data set.
  • Until recently, both newspapers were still in circulation and would therefore resonate with contemporary audiences.

The team would still be using both the British Newspaper online archive and the micro-film archive in Liverpool Central Library to conduct the research, and our focus would still be on logging all of the stories that contained the word ‘Toxteth’, but this time we could actually conduct the research in the time allocated. All the team needed to do now was to plan how we would implement this method…

You can download an outline of our research methodology from our resources page.

HLFNL_2747