England: the Other Within: Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum

Project Description:

'England: the Other Within' focuses on the Pitt Rivers Museum's surprisingly large collection of artefacts, photographs, and manuscripts from England. This resource has been created as part of the ESRC-funded Other Within research project. The project was set up to explore the English collections and what they can now tell us and was based at the Pitt Rivers Museum of the University of Oxford between 2006 and 2009. The Pitt Rivers has exceptional documentation, well over a quarter of a million objects and nearly three hundred thousand photos have all been logged into their database. The statistical analysis of the database allows us to better understand the shape and contents of the English collections since 1884. The English collections (as with collections from other countries in the Pitt Rivers Museum) are constantly being added to. The 'English collection' is therefore a constantly changing entity. These statistics were compiled at the beginning of the Other Within research project, in order that key areas of interest could be identified. They were calculated using data current in 2006. Other statistics available on other parts of this website may have been calculated more recently, therefore using slightly different base data. There are four ways to explore the data created by the 'Other Within' project. All of these methods give you more information about the kinds of artefacts that are in our English collections, where they came from, who gave them, and when they were made.

* Using maps of England to explore counties, cities, towns and villages and their related objects
* Objects database: to find out what English artefacts there are in the collections
* Photos database: to find out what kind of English photographs there are in the collections
* Individuals database: to discover more about the individuals connected to the collections as donors, collectors, owners and makers.