Preliminary Programme

Britain's relationship to and subsequent engagement in the process of European integration is one of the most important political, economic and social developments of the last 50 years. This relationship has always been controversial even before the UK in 1973 joined the EEC, as it then was, and has certainly remained controversial ever since. The views and arguments of those individuals and groups who have opposed British membership, commonly referred to over the last twenty years as 'Euroscepticism' has been one of the enduring elements of British political and media debate. In the previous 15 years - exactly the period of the Web Domain dataset - much of this debate has been undertaken on the Web with many pro and anti-European groups setting up webpages and engaging in debates over the Web via blogs and other postings. To date there has been no dedicated research based on these online sites and debates. In conjunction with more traditional archival research that I am undertaking on British Euroscepticism, my AADDA research is in the process of uncovering and analysing the phenomenon of Euroscepticism on the Web.

In doing this research I am utilising the following tools and digital research methods. In the first instance I am engaging in some Google style Ngram searching based on such key terms as Euroscepticism, EU, UKIP, Euroreferendum, etc. This is producing some interesting aggregate and qualitiative results, and patterns relating to volume, timing and variety of Websites and references. Following this I am undertaking some proximity searching of related terms to see if this brings up different results and patterns. In addition I am keen to see what searching under images, as one can do in the current UK Web Archive, brings in terms of results given what I suspect are a large number of images on these webpages. In addition I hope to see if sentiment analysis can be applied to gauge the degrees of negativity of Webpages/websites and how successfully it can do so. Finally I will complete the research by undertaking some filtering of the results based on such elements as domain type and medium type to see what and if any interesting patterns emerge.

This proposed paper will summarise the results of the above application of digital methodologies and will highlight the ways in which this research is able to enhance the analysis and understanding of the phenomenon of Euroscepticism.
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The English Health and Social Care Act of 2012 has introduced a major restructuring of the National Health Service (NHS). As part of this process public health duties have been removed from NHS bodies to become part of local government. The Department of Health (DH) describes the initiative as reviving 'a long and proud history' by 'returning public health home'. That history includes not only the achievements of Victorian sanitary reform, but also the early NHS, because in its original design public health departments were based in local authorities, where they remained until the NHS reorganisation of 1974. Policy-makers assert opportunities for public health to further its goals within the local government setting. They hope that by being more closely connected to local peoples' needs and living environments, health professionals will be able to develop better programmes and to tackle inequalities. This, they argue, should work better than 'one size fits all' policies.

What might the recent history of public health in local government tell us about the opportunities and challenges ahead? There is already a limited body of work examining the changes of 1974 from a national perspective, which argues that various problems had arisen. Post-war public health 'lost its way', lacking a clear philosophy and rationale at a time of rapidly changing health needs. It was also sidelined by other professional groups, delivering patchy services and failing to link effectively with the NHS. There is also a more recent history which is as yet unexamined. Since 2001, and gaining official force in 2006, the DH has championed the joint appointments of Directors of Public Health (DPH), to straddle both NHS primary care trusts and local authorities. The activities of these new appointees may give some interesting clues as to whether the structural and philosophical challenges of the earlier period retain their force or can be overcome.

The paper takes advantage of the newly available Dark Archive of the British Library and the various digital research tools that are on offer. It will use this resource to identify the web presence of the joint appointment DPHs during the period from 2001 up until the passage of the recent Act. By reading these texts and analysing them using digital tools this paper will ask and hopefully answer:

a. what was the chronology and geography of web representations of public health in local government?
b. whether a coherent rationale for public health in a local government setting is discernible?
c. what practices of joint working between NHS and local government are reported, and how are the benefits of localism represented?
d. how useful and effective were the digital tools on offer in addressing the above research questions?
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This proposed paper is based on my ongoing doctoral thesis entitled ‘Adrian Henri and Merseybeat poetry: performance, poetry, and public in the Liverpool Scene of the 1960s’ (at Royal Holloway, with Professor Robert Hampson). My work uses much archival research and oral memory, particularly in relation to the live event and oral poetry in Liverpool at the time.

Sentiment analysis of the Domain Dark Archive is an intriguing angle in relation to my work on the Liverpool Poets and their reception by not only the mainstream media but also by those who experienced their work at the time (in the form of memoir, via fan pages, forums, and the like), and as such is providing me with another area of information to consider alongside more traditional newspapers, interviews, and archival material.

In relation to the AADDA project I am exploring the use of proximity search. I have found in my research that a variety of labels have been attached to the poets, and I am most interested in seeing how Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten are referred to in forums and similar (informal) internet sites. Henri is often referred to in academic material as a poet/painter, but I want to find out how ordinary people, for want of a better word, labelled him – and I will then combine and compare this data with searches for the same terms from newspaper and published works, as there is a marked difference in academic and popular attitudes to the poets.

In addition, I am hoping to run geo-indexing analysis, to see where (as well as who and when) these results are coming from. I would expect results within Liverpool, but it would be interesting to see where else is recorded. It would be particularly interesting to see if the Liverpool 8 postcode (which is where the poets were living and working) would be an area of memorialisation.

The use of digital approaches and the domain dark archive are potentially important for my research because I am approaching the literary movement from a multi-, inter-, and cross- media perspective, to present Merseybeat poetry as ‘total art’. In the archives in Liverpool there are flyers for events with a variety of labels for the poets (many of which were written by the poets themselves for events and tours), but I want to be able to provide evidence for how the people experiencing the work have categorised the poets and I think that the digital approaches described above will help me prove my thesis. This paper will highlight how successful my engagement with AADDA and use of their digital tools proves to be for my wider doctoral research.
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