Using digital technology to engage people with varying degrees of sight loss with archives and filmmaking during COVID-19

Abstract

When the Covid-19 pandemic reached Europe in March 2020, the official archive for Northern Ireland, PRONI (Public Record Office of Northern Ireland) was forced to close its doors and move all work online, including its outreach programmes. One of the people to benefit from the programme was a group with different degrees of sight loss from the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB). Ten people aged 20-60s took part in Everyday is a School Day, an eight-week filmmaking project which used Zoom and smartphone filmmaking to connect them with PRONI’s archives and help them make short films about their experiences of education in 2021. A year later we brought the group back to PRONI for a second project, Music Tales, which helped them continue to develop filmmaking skills and to delve deeper into the archives and explore the role of music in their lives. In this article, we take the two projects as case studies and use a reflective methodology to analyse how Zoom technology and a participatory approach to filmmaking were used to enable the group to engage with archives and learn how to tell their stories through film.