Accessibility and Archives: The Antonia Project: Bringing the Past into the Future

This guest post is from Owen Barden, Assistant Professor in Intellectual Disability and Inclusion at Trinity College Dublin [bardeno@tcd.ie].  It is about how participatory methods were used in a research project on the history of learning disability.

This blog post is about a research project that came to be known affectionately by the research team involved as The Antonia Project, because it focused on the microhistory of a lady called Antonia Grandoni. Antonia lived in the mid-19th Century, when the phrase ‘learning disability’ did not yet exist, but we think that were she alive today, Antonia would be described as having a learning disability. Our research team included people with learning disabilities, academics, and support workers and family members. Half of us were based at The Brain Charity in Liverpool, and half at the Teaching and Research Advisory Committee at the University of South Wales. This post describes how we made archival research accessible for people with learning disabilities, and what we gained by doing so.

Figure 1: Pencil portrait by Antonia Grandoni

We received a £10,000 Digital Research in the Humanities grant from the British Academy / JISC to carry out the research. A condition of the grant was to use material in the UK Medical Heritage Library (UKMHL). The UKMHL contains over 70,000 digitised 19th Century medical texts, and is thus a very rich resource on the history of medicine. It is the result of a collaboration between Jisc, the Internet Archive, Wellcome Collection, and nine other medical and university libraries. At the time, the UKHML was accessed through a website called Historical Texts. Sadly, changing funding priorities mean this website is now defunct, but many of the materials it contained are still available via Wellcome Collection and the Internet Archive.

Like many archives, the UKMHL is a fabulous resource, but not very accessible – even for for skilled researchers. Firstly, the sheer number of available texts is potentially overwhelming. Secondly, the archive was set up with medical historians in mind, and organised accordingly. For instance, when entering the archive via the Historical Texts website, you were invited to search by either Body Parts or Medical Conditions, neither of which has an obvious link to learning disability. Thirdly, the language in many of the materials is both old fashioned and very technical. Using modern search terms such as “learning disability” does not yield very helpful results, instead generating a huge list of texts mentioning the word “learning.” It is better to use the old diagnostic labels like “idiot” or “imbecile”, but even after extensive filtering a researcher is still faced with thousands of texts to choose from. 

However, true to the ethos of inclusion, we recognised that everybody on the project had different areas of expertise they could draw on, and that this was a good thing. I, for example, had the skills to find materials relevant to learning disability. In contrast, many co-researchers had experience of living with a learning disability, a valuable kind of knowledge I lack. So, the project drew on our range of knowledge, skills and experience to better understand both Antonia Grandoni’s life, and what it’s like to live with a learning disability today.

Figure 2: Flyleaf of Ireland’s book, On Idiocy and Imbecility

Initially, I used my research skills to find and select a few texts from the UKMHL. The team then chose one of these texts to focus on. The book chosen was On Idiocy and Imbecility, written by Dr William Ireland and published in 1877.   Ireland’s book chosen because (i) he was a very influential figure at the time and (ii) it contained story of Antonia Grandoni, in the form of a 13-page case history. There is a descriptive account, two pencil portraits, and tables of her anatomical measurements. The history has been pieced together from the reports of doctors from Milan, where she lived with her family before being institutionalised in a hospital for an undisclosed period up until her death from septicaemia in 1872, at the age of 42. Antonia was diagnosed as being a “microcephalic idiot”, and appears in a chapter dedicated to that topic. This diagnosis is why we think she would be described today as having a learning disability.

The various elements of Antonia’s case history made it ripe for analysis, yet her perspective and voice are missing. This is why in the second, participatory step, we set out to rediscover and re-interpret Antonia’s story for the present day. For this step, we printed out the two portraits and created an easy-read version of Antonia’s case history. Over a series of workshops, we first collaboratively analysed these artefacts. We used three very simple prompts:

1.       How is Antonia described?

2.       What does the description make her sound like?

3.       How does it make you feel? 

Figure 3: Collaborative analysis of Antonia's story

These simple prompts were enough to fill enough pieces of flip chart paper to wallpaper the room, and many hours of discussion! We then moved to creative methods like collaging to interpret Antonia’s story and relate it to contemporary lived experiences of learning disability. We came to care a lot about Antonia, and think of her as one of us. We wanted to rehumanise her, and recognise her properly as a person. This is why you see her with hair and nicer clothes in the collage.

Figure 4: Collage made in response to Antonia’s Story

These activities – talking and making – were catalysts for people to tell their own stories of learning disability – their own histories. We might be tempted to think that society is more inclusive these days, but there seemed to be many similarities between Antonia’s life and the lives some of the co-researchers. Some of them talked, for instance, about being denied opportunities for romance and relationships; others about strict schedules and regimes in group accommodation. Many of these similarities are captured in the final graphic our professional illustrator created to summarise the project. It shows our research as a prism which allows us to see into the past and also sheds light onto many aspects of the present. Davy, one of the learning-disabled co-researchers, called this bringing the past into the future:

 Figure 5: Image summarising findings of The Antonia Project

Guest blogs are welcome.  Please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk.  We would also like to hear from you if you have found one of the Allies’ blogs helpful to your work.