Finding aids are tools that help researchers locate and understand items in an archive, first designed as a way to document the provenance of archival materials and collections. As such, archival description in finding aids contains information ranging from group memberships to sources of institutional funding, the details and duration of private collaborations, attendees of significant events, the stages of development of influential texts, and so on. Although finding aids are invaluable resources, the significance of and links between data are often obscured by their item- by-item format, and they remain underutilised for. purposes beyond searching for archival material.

We have designed and created the Cultural Studies Database (using Heurist infrastructure) to test the viability of using finding aid data to allow researchers to trace and reconstruct the semantic networks of key events in the development of cultural studies, as this is witnessed through the finding aids. This serves as a test case for archives to create a resource comprehensible to non-expert publics, and to exploit the benefits of digital accessibility while bypassing the arduous and costly process of full digitisation.

Users can either select pre-set filters to define the parameters of the dataset or search for a particular subject in order to access data; users can visualise record lists and network graphs relating to any item, actor, or event linked to their subject and navigate the database from there.

Access the Cultural Studies Database by clicking here.

The database design has been registered as a Heurist template and is fully useable and importable for other Heurist projects. It can be found here [link].

The full dataset can be downloaded in the following file formats: [link]