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Paper short abstract

The Regional Ethnology of Scotland Project is a collaborative initiative in which trained volunteers interview each other on those aspects of their lives and the places they live which are most meaningful to them. The paper examines how participation has shaped ideas of self, place and belonging

Paper long abstract

The Regional Ethnology of Scotland Project works with people in communities across Scotland to collect material relating to local life and society through recorded interviews.

The RESP is a key focus of the work of the European Ethnological Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Research staff at the Centre work in partnership with local people and organisations, such as archive and library services and schools, to reach as many people as possible so that the resulting archive of recordings can endeavour to represent people from across all parts of the community.

The result of this large-scale, multi-year collaborative project is an archive of thousands of hours of recordings, printed publications, film and other media which document communities talking about themselves, their pasts, their concerns, their experiences of change and continuity. Interviews are transcribed in full and are freely available through the project interface. The initiative is self-sustaining; once volunteers are trained up, communities are left continue to collect whatever matters to them, sharing the data with the project website.

As the Project approaches its last two years of funding, the paper offers a reflection on its achievements and methodology, including interviews conducted with those who have taken part over the years. How did participation shape volunteers' ideas of self and belonging? Did a stronger sense of regional identity emerge and if so how did it manifest itself?