Doing research in archives is a lonely business… or is it? The idea of a collaborative research week is to gather a group of historians around a theme – in our case, peace movements and decolonization, and first get to know each other’s research projects. What are we working on, what are we hoping to find in the archives, what problems do we want to solve? Then we map these out. Are we looking at similar questions from different perspectives? Do we have historical actors or organizations in common? What might our individual projects gain from pooling resources, and how might our individual research inform bigger questions on which we could work together?

Once that’s done, we will head into the archive. We will have several days to do primary source work for our individual research projects. But by then, we will not be in it just for ourselves: we will be in the archives knowing what everyone else is looking for, too. That means we can share sources in real time – studying often highly mobile individuals and groups means that they might appear in unlikely places. So if, for instance, one of us locates another person’s peace activist in the region they are working on, we can share the source right away. Imagine doing your research knowing that, in fact, many people are keeping an eye out for the things you are looking for! You might end up being pointed to documents for which you yourself had never thought to look.

We will also have an assistant on hand to enter the movements of peace advocates into our central dataset, as we find them. Our dataset also comes with a group library where we can reference the original sources. Here too, there is a cumulative effect: the dataset will be able to show connections that cannot be found in any single archival source, bringing information to light that will likely be useful to many of us.

Finally, we will be able to take full advantage of the assembled brain power. Are you trying to wrap your head around something puzzling you just found? Share it with the group over lunch. Are you just excited about a question that you were finally able to answer, or do you simply want to share finding something funny with people who get it? That’s what the group is for. On the final day, we’ll track progress both on our individual and collective endeavours, and hopefully walk away with lots of new ideas. At least, that’s the theory. We’ll let you know how it goes!