Project overview
The University of Southampton is home to world class knitting collections, which includes the Knitting Reference Library (KRL - https://www.southampton.ac.uk/intheloop/knitting-reference-library.page) that has works dating back to 1840. The Knitting Reference Library represent an extraordinary historical, geographical and disciplinary range, including knitted objects, books, exhibition catalogues, knitting patterns, journals, magazines, photographs, postcards, personal papers ranging from the everyday and kitsch to the historical and technical. At present only a small portion of this collection is available to the communities that have demonstrated an interest in them. The objects collected by Montse Stanley, for example, are held in Southampton Special Collections, due to their fragility, and are not easily made accessible to community spaces (e.g. meeting halls, home, or places where knitters are meeting). In addition, Southampton has also hosted six interdisciplinary and international 'In the Loop' conferences that use the collection as a springboard for knitting scholarship and as a medium to engage the knitting community. After last conference, the local community of knitters reported an interest in supporting the University to make the collection more inclusive bridging the divide between academic and public activities and knowledges. The project will rectify this by using the additional capability provided by the AHRC CapCo award to create an innovative 3d collection that will allow creative practitioners to engage with the material construction and format of objects within this library. Established methodologies such as photogrammetry, laser scanning and Reflectance Transformation Imaging will be used to create interactive 3d models and replicas of the objects the community can engage and experiment with. This engagement will be facilitated by a series of co-designed workshops, supported by creative practitioners, academic researchers and an oral historian, which will allow the local community to re-interpret the collection. The collection will be opened up to new conceptual, material, historical, narrative, and biographical resonances. We will then integrate these findings themselves back into the current online collections, in order to produce a rich and user-led permanent collection. The local knitting communities involved in the project includes Knit the Walls, the Women's Integration Group and the Southampton Student Union society Hookers, Knitters and Stitchers as established and inclusive group with different level of expertise.
