Poppies, partnerships and pragmatism: Learning from embedded research in a cultural heritage organisation

Megan Gooch and Eleanor O’Keeffe

Introduction

In this article we reflect on the opportunities and challenges presented by the changing conditions of humanities research in the United Kingdom by drawing on our experience of working on ‘embedded’ research in one of the UK’s most significant heritage organisations—Historic Royal Palaces (HRP). Cultural institutions, heritage organisations, arts companies and the UK government are increasingly articulating their social value, with research and funding recognising their function in promoting social cohesion or benefiting population health.¹ This increased emphasis on social and public functions, or, one could argue, the instrumentalisation of heritage and the arts by the state, increases the imperative for organisations who perform this work to be transparent about the values and decision-making that inform their work and to give a full account of their impacts and outcomes. Embedded research, we argue, has become an important model that these organisations will need to employ if they are to meet requirements that flow from their public significance. Yet such practices in the humanities are still relatively unknown and there is little articulation of best practice in this area. Drawing on our experiences on an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project (2018–20), we explore what it means to adapt ‘embedded’ research practices within cultural institutions and draw learning from this experience to guide future agendas and strategic investments.

More adaptable (and perhaps less threatening to organisations) than other probing methods of research, such as ‘organisational ethnography’, embedded research models clearly have a future in humanities research. In this article, we identify the unique benefits of embedded humanities research practice, primarily in terms of the access they give to important arenas for social and civic participation in contemporary societies, as well as the ways in which they disseminate the other knowledge and expertise of the institution. We note, too, how embedded research models encourage flexible and dynamic research practices, whereby researchers are encouraged to assemble multidisciplinary techniques and develop interdisciplinary thinking to study emerging political or cultural trends. But we also identify hurdles and how the mobility of embedded research can produce friction in the embedded context. Finally, we draw learning from our experience to inform the work of others considering the same pathways, whether individual researchers or organisations. A challenge remains, we argue, for organisations and funding bodies to utilise this model effectively, so that its results can be better integrated into policy and organisational thinking and its potential to flexibly respond to social issues is reached. It is best for researchers to be aware of those challenges when navigating their own positions in the institution.

Embedded research in the humanities—An overview of practice

‘Embedded’ methods of research are more commonly found in the social sciences and are usually associated with public health institutions, systems and research.² Although there are different kinds or levels of embedded research practice, a common belief is that integrating researchers within public health institutions facilitates the sharing of knowledge that the institution has developed, which can lead to a wider appreciation and understanding of beneficial practices, with relevance for policymaking, practice and society at large. ‘Embedded’ research practice thus implicitly recognises the social value of the institution and its knowledge and provides a way of linking it with policymaking systems. While the value of such public health research is accepted, it is only more recently, perhaps in the last two decades or so, that arts and cultural institutions have articulated similar arguments of social value. These discourses were initially framed in terms of economic contribution, but increasingly humanities, arts, culture and heritage are being considered for their wider, holistic significance. Evidence concerning their importance to wellbeing, mental health and social cohesion has become more prominent and clearly iterated, although scholars have raised questions about the ideas of ‘value’ that are iterated through these arguments.³

There are existing approaches in fields of humanities research that allow for organisations and institutions to be studied from the ‘inside’. Organisational ethnography, for instance, is a rich and burgeoning field of inquiry for many scholars in heritage and museum practice, for instance.⁴ But other models of insider inquiry have been supported at a strategic level. The extension of the ‘Independent Research Organisation’ (IRO) status within UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)—the public funding body that oversees research grant allocation—to cultural and heritage institutions in 2006–7 was a strategic validation of the social value of culture and heritage, the expertise that had evolved within such organisations, as well as contributions made by these institutions in the wider economy.⁵ This designation is now awarded to a number of museums, libraries, galleries and heritage bodies (as well as other institutions) and enables these organisations to bid for public funds for research or to contribute to skills and training (e.g. doctoral awards).⁶ This access to public funds aims to encourage collaboration and cross fertilisation of ideas between cultural organisations and institutions and researchers in higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK and across the globe. Acknowledging the value of research cultures outside of the academy, the IRO status was intended not only to facilitate knowledge sharing to benefit cultural and heritage organisations to build their strength and economic resilience and improve their public engagement practices, but also to build infrastructural capacity to communicate the value of UK heritage across the globe.⁷ In the words of Professor Andrew Thompson, former chief executive of the AHRC, ‘these organisations are a wonderful showcase for arts and humanities research, in all its richness and variety’.⁸

There have been surprisingly few analyses outside of UKRI of how IRO status has affected the research cultures of cultural institutions that speak from experience and the point of view of the researcher. This article critically engages with the ‘embedded’ opportunities provided by IRO status, thinking through its implications for research culture and knowledge production from that vantage point of practice. While the benefits of IRO status are clearly articulated and identified by the chief executive officers or leaders of various of these research institutions, researchers can productively add to these perspectives and identify the challenges or lost opportunities of the research they undertake within such institutions. Rarely are we asked to respond to the insights we gain into the systemic or structural aspects of our research positions. This case study, which unpacks the experiences on one research project that ran between 2018 and 2020 is, of course, specific to its context, but it encourages a broader conversation and reflection of what could improve efficiency and effectiveness within the system: what researchers can bear in mind when designing such projects; how the institutions themselves can adapt to them; and how lessons from the research can best be cycled back into practice and policy.

As such, this article undertakes a critical evaluation of research practices we developed during this embedded project, attempting to formulate learning outcomes that we believe will be beneficial to others. It is not an (auto) ethnography of how our setting informed our research or the knowledge we produced. As individuals, we were on different research contracts, and had different histories with HRP; we have different perspectives on our work on this research project and would describe our embedded practices in different ways according to these factors. By formulating our practice-based learnings and articulating common findings, however, we hope to contribute to the growing culture of embedded research in the humanities, acknowledging that we present a singular perspective on these issues.⁹ As we propose in this article, one of the primary challenges in this area is synergising the learnings from short-term research project cycles within the longer-term reflective and learning apparatus of institutions. In this case, the pandemic exacerbated this dilemma, by tightening time frames and complicating the end of the project. We consider this article, then, in the vein of an exit interview or project evaluation, but one we feel has relevance for a wider audience in this burgeoning new mode of inquiry for the humanities.

‘Lest We Forget’ at Historic Royal Palaces, 2018–20

In many ways, this article exemplifies a key success of the IRO model: how the ability to apply for public funding encourages more dynamic, interdisciplinary research interventions that can benefit organisations, the heritage/arts sector and policy more generally. ‘Lest We Forget: Poppies and Public Commemoration’ (LWF), based at heritage organisation and charity HRP, was funded by the AHRC to examine the nature and significance of the contemporary commemoration cultures that arose through and around Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red (BSL&SR) in 2014.¹⁰ BSL&SR was an installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies ‘planted’ by volunteers in the Tower of London’s moat for the centenary of World War I (see Figure 1). The project was ‘embedded’ (as the application described it) within the Public Engagement Directorate at HRP, which manages six palaces, including the Tower of London. The research project aimed to make use of the significant project ephemera and digital archives extant from the installation, which would inform understanding about the politics and emotions invested in commemorative activity in the UK, as well as understanding of how heritage practice can best synergise with these social and cultural currents.

Figure 1: Image of Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red on 14 November 2014, during the deinstallation period.

View from the walls of the Tower of London encompasses the ceramic poppies being packaged to send to those who had bought them, and the crowds viewing the installation from above the moat.

Source: © Megan Gooch.

The award of the AHRC research grant recognised the cultural significance of the installation. BSL&SR had been, in HRP’s terms, a global phenomenon; it was widely seen as a national hit by commentators and enjoyed enthusiastic media coverage during its five-month run and beyond. Over 5 million people, they estimated, had visited the installation in situ at the Tower of London and (hundreds of) thousands more engaged in other ways: online through social media, nominating relatives for digital memorial or purchasing one of the installation’s poppies as a keepsake.¹¹ For HRP, the installation has gone down in corporate memory as a signifier of its ambition, innovation and the ways in which it can pivot to address the social issues of the day. BLS&SR epitomised HRP’s own (sectoral) evolution away from buildings- and collections-focused understandings of the significance of heritage work to more a diffusive idea of heritage, and a shift in priorities towards creativity—a sectoral shift seen in ‘new museology’ discourses that described the changing social role of museums and museum workers within society. This manifested as a centring of community engagement and active roles of visitors in meaning-making, and the de-centring of authoritative curatorial interpretation.¹²

HRP’s capacity to intervene in the centenary through BSL&SR reflected these strategic reorientations. The previous year had seen new executive hires and a restructure, producing the Learning & Engagement and Creative Programming & Interpretation teams, led by Elizabeth Mackay and Deborah Shaw, respectively. It could thus join in the frenetic cultural engagement that the centenary produced, within and beyond the UK, despite WWI not being within its usual zone of operations. BSL&SR joined other commemorative arts and heritage productions, such as those produced under the commissioning organisation 14–18 NOW,¹³ which achieved considerable levels of participation, and other stand out and highly popular engagements across the globe, such as the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tonarewa Gallipoli exhibition that had in excess of 3 million visitors.¹⁴ BSL&SR, however, was undoubtedly seen by many as the most popular of the UK’s centenary offerings, which was an incredible and unexpected achievement for an organisation that had no previous work in this area. HRP’s IRO status, won in 2015, allowed the organisation to take a lead in analysing and researching its own work, as it became increasingly apparent that WWI was, by dint of its success and scale, an emerging and burgeoning field of scholarly inquiry across disciplines.¹⁵

The research grant implicitly acknowledged the social value of arts, culture and heritage and the mobilisation of these to engage on issues of citizenship. BSL&SR, after all, intervened during a period when arts, culture and heritage reached a new zenith of influence in government and in society: the centenary of WWI, which accorded a new, hugely significant and funded role for the cultural sector and not simply in the UK.¹⁶ In 2012, Prime Minister David Cameron, head of a conservative-led coalition government, announced a program of spending for the centenary, devolving much of this to arts, culture and heritage to carry out events across the nation, many of which were under the leadership of a specially created arts consortium, 14–18 NOW.¹⁷ This instrumentalisation of the arts to create (in the words of Cameron) a ‘truly national commemoration’¹⁸ was not only deeply intertwined with the politics of race in contemporary Britain,¹⁹ but also legitimised and reinforced the place of arts in national life and citizen-making. New interpretations from artists would transmit what the prime minister saw as the emotional resonance of the war to more distant, younger and far more diverse generations, to reinvigorate WWI (and arguably WWII) as a binding, national myth to gloss over multicultural Britain, which emphasised the ‘muscular liberal’ values of his own conservative vision.²⁰

The award of £201,080 to study BSL&SR acknowledged both the public interest in the installation and the increasingly significant contribution of heritage work, concepts and practice to national life. It also reflected the internal impact of the IRO award (made to HRP in 2015) and the beginnings of an organisational research evolution away from its core, site-specific exhibition or programming concerns. Much of this innovation had been steered by public engagement (interpretation and education) teams, who had begun to explore broader themes related to heritage studies, such as dark tourism, to bring complexity to the Tower’s bloody national myths.²¹ Before BSL&SR, an earlier AHRC-funded research project, ‘The Significance of the Centenary’, led by cultural scholars Joanne Sayner and Jenny Kidd, had worked with Alex Drago (education manager) from HRP to explore ideas about centenary work in museum and heritage organisations in advance of centenary.²² This new partnership included one of the authors of this paper, Megan Gooch, who was a former curator at HRP, and who spearheaded the LWF funding application and took it forward to bid for the AHRC Leadership Fellow scheme.

The external award provided the means to accommodate the multidisciplinary skills needed to study contemporary commemorative practice in a museum context and, specifically, at HRP. The advisory board, for instance, included scholars from museum and memory studies, with specialisms in digital technologies. Former CEO Michael Day, who had led the organisation through BSL&SR but retired from the post in 2018, provided much needed internal legitimacy to the project, as well as insight into the production processes.²³ Day had already written a review of the project based on some of the extant material at HRP and went on to give scholarly lectures on his leadership of HRP, using the ‘Tower Poppies’ as a prominent case study.²⁴ In addition, ‘outside’ researchers allowed a range of other skills to become invested in the project, such as historical understanding of the development of UK commemoration brought by O’Keeffe who joined as a research associate in September 2018. In addition, heritage insight and knowledge became accessible via the situation of the project team in the Public Engagement Directorate, itself legacy of the installation created in 2018 that reflected the increased importance of creative innovation in programming and community engaged work. LWF became part of the Arts and Cultural Programming (ACP) team, which included a small number of creative producers who were responsible for steering creative innovation, such as developing new artistic partnerships and exploring new paths for engagement.

This ‘embeddedness’ of LWF suggested new horizons for HRP research and a greater recognition of its wideranging expertise and holistic research capability on the part of its research strategists. Curatorial departments are usually seen as the final point of research cultures in museums and heritage organisations. They are rarely joined up with the vibrant research capability of other areas of work, such as visitor studies, audience engagements and insights-based knowledge in areas such as marketing or website development. Based in the Public Engagement Directorate, but linked to curatorial research cultures, LWF was able to encompass all these areas of organisational insight and put them into dialogue. The project recognised the research capability of all areas of heritage and museum work and attempted to capitalise and systematise these information gathering aspects to coordinate an overarching and empirical understanding of how various UK publics had responded to one of the most significant cultural events in recent UK history.

The IRO award thus made possible a pan-organisational knowledge, which could be translated to the sector and policy work.²⁵ As researchers, we had access to material that usually would have been hidden behind organisational firewalls and which gave an extraordinary insight into the different meanings and cultural practices that people brought to BSL&SR and how they interacted with HRP’s programming streams. We were given access to the BSL&SR files on a shared drive, with the project’s internal name ‘Poppies’, that contained folders relating to communications from the public and that were revealing of motivations and interpretations they brought to the installation (see Table 1). This folder included an online ‘mosaic’ of user-generated dedications to the war dead, nominations of war casualties to a nightly Roll of Honour ceremony, some visitor and staff interviews undertaken during November 2014, collated spreadsheets of customer feedback, and an email account for the volunteers. There was also a small collection of ephemera, largely comprising wooden crosses and paper poppies, left spontaneously at the fences atop the moat while BSL&SR was in place, which were collected nightly by yeoman warders (beefeaters) and collected by Tower curator Dr Sally Dixon-Smith.

Table 1: Summary of the ‘Poppies archive’ and other organisational data available to the ‘Lest We Forget’ research team.

Digital strands of BSL&SR	Public engagement and outreach strands	BSL&SR project management data	Interviews and oral histories
Online ‘mosaic’ of 9,059 crowdsourced dedications	Learning resources	Roll of Honour name lists	Interviews with HRP staff (2014–19)
Social media #TowerPoppies dataset of 95,145 tweets	Marketing materials	Visitor feedback	Interviews with the public (2014–19)
Internal reports	Interpretation panels	Spontaneous memorials	Interviews with contractors (2014–19)
Poppy purchase data	Curatorial research on WWI	Press commentaries
Tower annual survey		Volunteer shift data

Source: Authors’ research.

The privileged positioning of the project opened other data doors, which produced additional streams of information about public participation in the installation. This included a dataset of 95,146 Twitter responses using #TowerPoppies, which had been the social media campaign, and which was produced via the press team, who had an account with Pulsar Platform.²⁶ It also brought, through similar relationship building and tracing potential data pathways, a significant dataset relating to the customer relations management system, which had some extant information about numbers and location of different ‘Poppy Users’. Aside from digital artefacts, the embeddedness of the project created an extraordinary opportunity to learn from those who had been situated within the public response and knew its effects: front of house or call centre teams, education and interpretation managers, yeoman warders, website designers and other heritage workers who managed the digital infrastructure created for the installation, including applications for the Roll of Honour ritual and the online memorial mosaic. Starting in the spring of 2019, the project interviews produced an oral history archive of 91 interviews by the end of the project.

This multimodal evidence base demanded multi-method design and approach, which the project facilitated. LWF engaged a range of different qualitative analytic techniques, which capitalised and exploited the range of data to understand the commemorative reflex in BSL&SR. For instance, Gooch’s study of the ‘Memorial Mosaic’, an online memorial database in which members of the public could memorialise their ancestors or relatives, analysed submissions thematically, as well as by visual content, to highlight new memorial vistas made possible through the installation’s digital outreach.²⁷ O’Keeffe’s analysis of submissions for the daily reading ceremony was able to identify the in-built inequalities of cultures of commemoration that the installation routed and unwittingly replicated. Working on Twitter data, both Gooch and O’Keeffe explored the public discourses that surrounded BSL&SR using qualitative and hashtag analysis. But empirical investigation and the careful piecing together of evidence from different source bases, such as customer feedback spreadsheets, archived email inboxes and interviews (essentially historical methods) allowed for a multidimensional understanding of commemorative practice as structured and individual, emotional and political.²⁸ These in-depth analyses of material are not usually possible within the working cultures of these organisations.

By embedding, as envisaged by the IRO structure, the research could feed immediately back into heritage practice, rather than exist on the ‘fringes of academic circles’, or perpetuate a ‘dysfunctional divide between practitioners and theorists’.²⁹ As LWF’s research began, HRP was in the midst of planning and delivering Beyond the Deepening Shadows (BTDS) in 2018, a nine-day run of a sound, light and movement installation in the Tower of London moat that commemorated the end of WWI.³⁰ This commemoration also proved popular with visitors, with an estimated 70,000 people attending the final night on 11 November 2018. While LWF was not part of the planning or design of BTDS, its members did consult with HRP on the project; for LWF, the installation became another opportunity to test the temperature of public participation with heritage commemorative practice and analyse organisational responses. Gooch and O’Keeffe, along with trained volunteers, undertook fieldwork with visitors to the installation over the seven nights and fed this back to the organisational review process. In addition, the project’s early findings contributed to HRP’s official response to a House of Commons Parliamentary Select Committee review of the funding, the role of the arts and the audiences who engaged with the centenary.³¹

The LWF research project produced significant insights into ‘heritagised commemoration’, which the authors understand as a distinct set of commemorative practices scaffolded and made possible by heritage work that invokes interrelated understandings of heritage that are distinct to place. While publications are still in development from this research (a point discussed below), articles will include an overarching assessment of whether the installation constituted, in Sayner and Kidd’s conception, ‘unthinking remembrance’,³² as well as analyses of specific elements of the installation, such as the nature and extent of public history learning accrued by HRP staff through heritage volunteering, and/or insights into what flows from digital memorial practice in this context. Access to HRP’s legacy data have created considerable opportunities to produce and share empirical evidence that can inform the digital work of museums and heritage in the future. That these publications engage with debates in heritage studies, death studies, memory studies, public history, and communities and media research, among other areas, should convey clearly how heritage organisations capture and archive (if sometimes unwittingly) core social and cultural shifts and how important it is to find ways to share and develop these insights in the future.

Navigating embeddedness in the institution: Challenges and unfinished business

But is that the whole story? The narrative of successes of LWF that we outline here is, we believe, fully justified, but it is accompanied by caveats that we hope will improve embedded research practice more generally. Neither institutions nor researchers are fully prepared for the implications that arise from embedded research. For researchers already working in an organisation, the shift to embedded research can be a difficult one to navigate. For new staff, the challenges of adapting to a new workplace are multiplied. For organisations, the realities of having embedded researchers as employees vary from the mundanities of deciding which department they should work within to thinking through how to capitalise on the benefits and results of the work being undertaken. In heritage organisations, the ‘business as usual’ of opening the site, developing new programming and delivering visitor experiences are often more pressing than detailed reflections of events in the corporate distant past.

From the start, there was clearly a tension between the HRP’s ambition to fully realise its IRO status through conducting good ‘objective’ research on its archived material and its understandable need to protect its business interests. This question had been raised during peer review, when one reviewer asked whether there might be a perception of reputational issues for HRP in the research project due to the high-profile and politically charged nature of some of the discourse around the installation. This could, the reviewer suggested, potentially be at odds with the research application’s stated ambitions of critiquing the ‘success’ of the poppies project. How would HRP manage this?

We believe, from the considerable access to the material that we were given, HRP managed to strike an appropriate balance between allowing material into the public domain and retaining control over sensitive domains. We were given complete access to the project folder for BSL&SR and to the public engagement folders, which allowed us to historicise and understand the trajectories that informed BSL&SR design by placing them in the context of wider public engagement development. If anything, then, HRP may have been too open to a research gaze for its own good. But these issues were never openly or transparently confronted. Gooch, for instance, received a steer in developing her proposal that it should focus on the audience interpretations of the installation and HRP’s role therein, rather than review project management decisions or financial concerns. And such restrictions made business sense: BSL&SR was very much still a part of centenary discussions in the media as the LWF team began work, and the centenary commemorations ended in 2018. But there was no formal addenda or schedule of agreed documentation that would be entered into the LWF project. We were handed the keys to the castle.

HRP handled its reputational interest at the level of the employee contract, rather than through clear communication about what it would (and would not) be prepared to tolerate. As with most organisational contracts, Gooch and O’Keeffe both agreed to not engage in ‘reputational’ damage of the organisation—a clause that is open to interpretation, but that certainly deters employees from public criticism or sharing information that could be seen as inflammatory. Our employment contracts were more restrictive than standard academic contracts, with all ideas and intellectual property created while under HRP’s employ remaining the intellectual property of HRP, rather than our own. However, where those lines were drawn around the project-folder-as-archive was unclear. It was up to us, as researchers, to decide those limits and make judgements for ourselves as we progressed, with the input of HRP’s research committee, and de facto ethics committee.

Some may call HRP’s open-ness enlightened. Certainly, during conversations, the former CEO Michael Day was entirely supportive of researchers delving into the archives of ‘Poppies’—the installation and those who worked so tirelessly on it had nothing to hide and everything to give. For the researcher, however, it made research perilous and somewhat anxiety ridden: what counts as reputational damage? We were employees of a charity; we had a legal duty to maintain the organisation’s integrity to the wider world; we felt the burden, too, of essentially evaluating work that had been done by colleagues we worked closely with. Was any deviation from the official corporate narrative of ‘Poppies’ (e.g. an overwhelming success) inflammatory? For researchers embedded within businesses or public organisations, there was an established methodological discourse, but the literature on embedded research within a museum or heritage organisation is limited.³³ Aside from conversations with academic colleagues who had undertaken doctoral training partnerships in similar institutions (who faced some of the same dilemmas), we found little guidance in scholarship that fitted our circumstances. Organisational ethnographers navigated their positionality, fears, biases and understandings in longer timescales and—commonly—on a shared understanding of their organisational remit.³⁴ We felt the lack of a neutral space to critically navigate the relationship between power and knowledge production in our research and articulate our research and our productive ‘complicity’ in aspects of HRP’s work.³⁵

We found no organisational space for this, perhaps because we could not integrate into a research culture in which seminars or workshops were planned far in advance, and which had very specific interests. We were ‘one-offs’—working on a short-term project that studied an exceptional moment in HRP’s past. The firewalls had been removed, in terms of access to records, but they had been equally redrawn around us. In such research, you feel a professional obligation to, as the saying goes, ‘speak truth to power’—to present the institution with research that may challenge the corporate image of its archives and its working practices. You do so out of the belief that, in doing so, you can both support internal learning and disseminate the in situ learning that many HRP employees developed during their work on a challenging project. But, at the same time, there are clearly risks for researchers whose study reaches deep into the reputation and identity of institutions. A recent example in the UK, for instance, in which Oxford colleges invited academic researchers to interrogate their role in slavery, has clearly shown that, when institutions do not like the fruits of such labour, one recourse is to undermine the professional integrity of those who produced it.³⁶ It is easy to jettison researchers who are no longer employees and with whom you have no long-term relationship.

Neither does ‘embeddedness’ make research frictionless. We faced another challenge in the scale and nature of the data we were given access to. HRP had no archive, data repository or archivist. A records management team existed at the time; it was prioritising records due for imminent deposit in the National Archives, developing new records management policies and advocating for good data management practices across the organisation. The ‘legacy data’ was unarchived—a collection of project management ephemera that had been left untouched since the project wound up in June 2015. Many of the data had a feeling of abandonment: one moment they were working documents and the next they were superseded by a new day, a new download, a new task or a new project. Opening a document was like entering a room the occupants had just left—full of details, significant notes and internal logic that made sense to the author but was never intended to be of use to other colleagues, let alone a researcher. Much of this material had to be risk assessed, reconstructed and re-signified, drawing on the insight and knowledge of heritage staff who had shaped the data, many of whom were still in post (or in different roles) in 2018–19. We relied on them to share passwords for protected spreadsheets or to orient us around provenance so we could fully position them in the installation’s context.

The levels of staff time for this enterprise were significant and largely unpredicted within the project planning and timescales. This had repercussions for the LWF team, who were faced with a gargantuan task. The archive, in whatever form we find it—in the search room with a meticulous catalogue, or the cluttered working files of an organisational shared drive—has the power to wrongfoot us and absorb more time than anticipated. Therefore, a great deal more time should have been spent in advance of the application and receipt of the grant in identifying this issue, which would have allowed it to be factored into project planning and timescales—itself a difficult proposition for organisations to resource themselves. But it had wider staff implications, considering the amount of time we needed from other staff to help us piece these records back together. We do not know how they accounted for that time, although we emphasised the voluntary nature of participation and that they should get agreement for their participation from their line management. At times, we felt that higher management had (at least informally) authorised staff members to support the project if they wished, on the understanding that they had contributed to such an important installation. But this was not always clear. Our embeddedness became entangled with interpersonal feelings of obligation, which we knew staff felt to HRP and the installation itself, which had a wide organisational significance as the pinnacle of corporate success to date.

The dynamics between the research project and the wider staff cultures at the Public Engagement Directorate were, then, not fully thought through, largely because this was a first for everyone. LWF was only HRP’s second AHRC-funded project as an IRO, and its first situated outside of the Curatorial Department. HRP staff at this time generally identified the research function of the organisation as belonging with the curators—the team that had led HRP’s successful application for IRO status, and that most often undertook and presented research within the HRP as a core part of their job. As a heritage site, ‘research’ meant histories of people, objects or buildings for most staff at HRP. LWF challenged these received notions of what research was or could be because it centred a contemporary programming event and studied its project traces. Some colleagues were at first baffled that LWF was not, in fact, a research project about WWI. Initially, we also felt there was a disconnect between the LWF team, who slowed down programming time to critically review a past project, and our colleagues in ACP, who worked at an extraordinary pace and looked to the future with energetic optimism. Nearing the end of the project, we found a collective tempo: we held a round table for ACP to reflect on what ‘Poppies’ had meant in the history of HRP’s programming practices, sharing perspectives and our understandings of HRP’s recent past. These insights informed LWF understanding of the installation and its impacts.

It was difficult, therefore, to engage staff with the learning that we gleaned from BSL&SR within the timescales of this 18-month project. Developing relationships and dialogues across HRP’s directorates took time, as did the development of the research insights themselves. For instance, the volunteer manager and others working with the volunteers understood the benefits of working with LWF: they shared data and reflections on the volunteer experience, we talked about the practices they engaged in and what they had learned from them. But the learning that HRP’s practitioners in this area could now draw from, the findings gleaned from volunteer interviews, for instance, was iterated outside the project’s embedded research.

Sometimes, too, it was simply hard to convince staff regarding the relevance of research because of the ever-changing nature of heritage work. In our perception, some felt LWF was anachronistic; too focused on an unusually successful singular event, which happened too long ago (in the corporate memory of HRP) for people to see value for their working practices. In 2014, for instance, #TowerPoppies had been HRP’s first major social media campaign; in 2019, HRP had a designated social media producer who had undertaken several creative and successful campaigns since, although 2014 remained by far its most impactful in terms of reach.³⁷ If we had wider support among senior management to institute regular spaces for dialogue between the project and staff, it might have been easier to build and develop these relationships within these short time frames, create dialogues between us and HRP’s communities of practice, and draw out the common points of learning and interest.

We argue this was a missed opportunity for HRP. The relentless ‘now’ of heritage work makes some space for reflection on previous programs, exhibitions and events. At HRP this was codified in the project management system’s post-project review, and the demand for all learning and engagement projects to have an evaluation plan. However, there was no room for the scale of holistic data collection, the in-depth analysis (especially qualitative analysis) and the level of reflection enabled by LWF for every, or indeed any, element of heritage business as usual. Such analysis could have been used by engaging heritage-makers, interpretation teams, front of house managers and creative producers to engage with broader and more difficult questions about audience engagement and inclusion, as well as staff experiences of difficult and challenging working conditions. It could have refined the corporate memory of success to be better positioned for the next pitch. A good example of this, for instance, is the volunteer mobilisation for LWF, which is a singularly successful example of mega-event mobilisation of corporate networks on one level, seen in terms of sheer numbers, but an unequal assemblage of populations that calls into question the site’s claims to ‘public history’.³⁸ Continual learning from its own data, therefore, which LWF offered, could have generated new approaches in the future about the effects of some aspects of its strategic decision-making, which could have been adjusted for greater access in the future.

Establishing systematic approaches to encouraging such feedback cycles may have reaped benefits, but this could not be done under the auspices of a single project. LWF thus made little impact on the research culture it was embedded in. Based on the research program, and its findings, the team made arguments for HRP’s Curatorial Department to invest in new directions, such as a museum sociologist, which would support HRP’s vision to engage with the social issues of the day and connect curatorial and public engagement knowledge. This broader ambition of including public engagement research remains as part of a research area for HRP in their current research strategy,³⁹ but it is not a priority in the way that recruitment for a curator for inclusive history has been, a role that is intended to connect diverse audiences with the histories of its palaces. Such priorities are pressing, but ideally there would be additional space for HRP to provide the deep thinking on its many layered research cultures, which may have strategic level impacts. In 2020, for instance, HRP announced its new ambition ‘to create space for spirits to stir and be stirred’.⁴⁰ The CEO and directors may have been less willing to draw from the well of the ‘Poppies’ myth if they had understood the full extent of the challenges that scaling up emotional programming had for staff and publics, and the implications of this programming approach for heritage practice and identity politics more generally.⁴¹

Lastly, as with many research projects, the ‘writing up’ period has extended beyond the formal end of the project, and both of our employment contracts. Indeed, since we left HRP in 2019 and 2020, we have not only missed the opportunity to write up within our host organisation, but also to advocate for our findings from an embedded position. The research team now operates at a distance from its host organisation, but with formal and informal ties tethering us to our former employer. This creates some ambiguities and uncertainties for both parties. For instance, the official photo archive was part of the poppies project folder, which was the archival basis of LWF and ensured its receipt of public money. This suggests authority to use those as part of the publications process, but this is not clear. Whereas previously we were able to gauge sensitive topics for the organisation based on internal newsletters, briefings and our daily work and meetings, we now must consult the colleagues in the research team. HRP kept access to email accounts open to allow engagement with research participants, but when disabled due to a change of password security practice the outsider status of former employees makes it very difficult to reconnect.

Outside embedded situations, publications become potentially difficult sites to negotiate, as HRP has a fair and obvious interest in the findings of the research, both as the subject of it and because it emanated from its research culture. Had we remained at HRP, we would have envisaged working up these papers within that research culture: for instance, sharing short papers in research seminars, which may have demystified the research and de-escalated our concerns regarding HRP’s potential response to it. Leaving HRP, we have shared some work on an ad hoc basis. The Curatorial Department has been incredibly supportive and warm to our outputs, as former HRP researchers. Yet, at the same time, there is clearly a reputational element that the organisation has to grapple with and (an assumption on our part) HRP believes that distance is necessary for the ‘objective-ness’ of this research. A draft of a forthcoming article, which covers the range of public response to the installation that HRP encountered, has been shared with the press team, for instance, because of the media attention that may arise from descriptions there and the press team’s need to prepare a statement. But information does not flow the other way regarding what HRP envisages may be the fallout from this article or what statements it has prepared to counter this.

Internally, this stage of the research project and the production of publications may have yielded exciting and enriching discussions had we remained embedded and employed. This may have brought together different parts of the organisation into conversation over the impacts of heritage design and programming practices it still uses. Instead, we navigate these areas through relational practices alone, balancing a certain amount of ambiguity with considerable goodwill. From a researcher standpoint, it feels unsatisfactory to have developed knowledge of organisational practice that cannot be applied in other contexts or utilised in the ways it might have been, such as to develop a data repository, contribute to an archive, review procedures for front of house staff, or inform interpretation and design, even if a considerable amount of other knowledge can be used to enrich our understanding of identity-making commemorative practices in the UK—especially just as the four nations itself were being called into question. The research material that LWF studied has historical significance as an archive of public feeling, political action and citizenship that will continue to be of use and interest to researchers down the decades. We envisage and hope further work with HRP will allow us to recognise and communicate the importance of this collection.

Lessons from embeddedness

As researchers we learn from our experiences and aim to improve our research methods and practice for the next project. For embedded researchers, we can also prepare the ground for future researchers, and contribute to the refinement of a research culture that is distinct and productive, perhaps even more valuable and enriching than those of HEIs. Reflecting on embedded research practices in the public domain is a necessity. The heritage sector, as academia, is full of short-term employment contracts and employment precarity. The researchers themselves are not always able to contribute to the institution’s learning, as they may have moved roles (as Gooch did) or come to the end of a fixed-term contract (as O’Keeffe did). Yet we hope embedded research practices will flourish at HRP and beyond. There remain many potential projects in HRP’s assemblage of project files and documentation that testify to the changing ways in which people have made meaning in its sites from its foundation in the late 1990s onwards and the role of interpretation and heritage practice therein.⁴² The following four points of guidance may encourage further embedded projects at HRP and elsewhere and support them to achieve success.

Flexing organisational memory

In HRP, as in many IROs, the mechanism for building robust organisational memory of embedded research and researchers is through the research team. For LWF, unfortunately, the end of the project in early 2020 coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. HRP, like many heritage institutions in the UK, took advantage of the government’s furlough scheme, which subsidised employment if employees undertook no work. HRP’s organisation learning in this area was therefore splintered by the absence of key HRP staff for a prolonged period. Yet, if the pandemic had not intervened, HRP had the tools with which to learn; they had used standard post-project review report templates in BSL&SR and many other public engagement projects. A short and slightly amended review could be undertaken for each research project to better understand the challenges and benefits of embedded research, and these data could be used to support further applications for grant funding. Another standard tool for HRP, the exit interview, could also be adjusted so that researchers leaving the organisation could reflect on their research, handover any archive assets or datasets, and ensure that there were organisational rather than personal records connecting the departing researcher with their primary sources. Such strategies to reflect upon, learn from and improve research culture could be implemented in many heritage organisations without investment or development of burdensome new procedures, but instead by repurposing existing projects or program management tools from within the organisation.

Reviewing and systematising embedded research

Both funders and organisations could work together to reflect on the model, improve it and better systematise embedded research practice within organisations. IROs are now an established part of AHRC’s funding model—an achievement that reflected the energetic action of UKRI and executive leaders in industry and the arts, culture and heritage sectors. Now that this initial phase has passed, the focus can move to reviewing the impact of IRO status for the organisation or refining staffing models and systems to ensure greater discourse or fusion between embedded research and the wider cultures of the organisation. In organisations, there could be further advocacy and buy-in from senior management to validate IRO embedded research and integrate it into work systems and routines, to ease the relationships between embedded researchers and other employees. The funder could make reflective evaluation, or evidence of clear strategic thinking about the place of embedded research in the organisation, a condition for research funding, or, simply, they could provide guidance about how best to build organisational capacities to ensure best practice.

Building partnerships and networks

In addition, the funder (in this case the AHRC) could encourage or facilitate clearer partnerships between IROs and HEIs for knowledge and resources sharing. HEIs could allow IROs to buy into research support services such as ethics approval pathways, research data repositories or researcher training programs. A network for embedded researchers within other IROs would create a learning mechanism, and help individuals share and learn from the breadth of experiences in this sector. It would encourage greater knowledge sharing between researchers from different contexts, and could provide opportunities for more research collaborations between different types of research organisation and HEIs. This suggestion is not intended to imply a disparity of quality between IROs and HEIs; the AHRC peer review process is robust, and its mission statement is that it ‘funds outstanding original research across the whole range of the arts and humanities’.⁴³ Our suggestion is based on our subsequent employment within HEIs and the range of professional support available there: teams of research facilitators who understand the grant writing process and funder policies, financial accountants who are experienced in project budgets, the availability of open research data repositories and highly codified ethics pathways. This contrasts markedly with organisations whose main business is not research but delivering heritage experiences and opening buildings to the public. However, as a research team we certainly benefited immeasurably from areas where HRP had particularly strong investment (e.g. audience data insight).

Evaluation pathways

We believe funders should create an evaluation pathway appropriate for IRO research cultures and how they function. At present in the UK, neither IROs nor their researchers are subject to the Research Excellence Framework (REF), a major evaluation of research quality that happens roughly every seven years and affects core research funding for HEIs. Research environment was a key component of the 2021 REF, along with assessment of researcher publications and impact to society from the research produced. Only initial guidance for the next REF in 2028 is currently available, but early indications show that the new ‘People, Culture and Environment’ element will receive a larger weighting than the REF 2021 ‘Research Environment’ element.⁴⁴ The scale of IRO research compared to HEIs would make the REF process for the former an unnecessary burden, and IRO research is not funded in the same REF-dependent manner as HEIs. However, some of the qualities of the REF may be useful in recognising the value of IRO-based research. Recognising excellence in this area would help smaller IROs generate further funding and support researchers in these environments to achieve their potential.

Conclusion

Humanities research in the future will depend more on these embedded, or partnership, approaches as the heritage and cultural sector orients itself more to issues of social relevance and value and these institutions develop greater social knowledge. LWF demonstrated that the increased social significance of heritage spaces and cultural work necessitates the kinds of flexible and dynamic research approaches that embedded cultures make possible. The IRO model allows research to keep step with the kinds of social interventions that heritage and cultural institutions are envisaging now and for years to come. However, while ‘embeddedness’ facilitates a turnover of research area and infusion of new staff expertise to study different evidence bases, it must be met and supported by systemic and strategic interventions to deal with the challenges that ensue: to establish procedures for internal sharing and review with staff, for instance, or agree on organisational messaging and the internal purpose of the project. Researchers should also be encouraged to reflect on learnings from the research experience itself, to establish a legacy for the future and improve practice more generally. While the findings of LWF in areas such as commemorative practice and cultural technologies will be shared in other publications, we hope that these learnings will support others who wish to draw from organisational knowledge to benefit humanities (and social science) research areas more generally.

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1. 1 Joanna Sofaer, Ben Davenport, Marie Louise, Stig Sørensen, Eirini Gallou and David Uzzell, ‘Heritage Sites, Value and Wellbeing: Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic in England’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 27, no. 11 (2 November 2021): 1117–32, doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2021.1955729.

2. 2 Abdul Ghaffar, Anuradha Gupta, Aboubacar Kampo and Soumya Swaminathan, ‘The Value and Promise of Embedded Research’, Health Research Policy and Systems 19, no. Suppl 2 (11 August 2021): 99, doi.org/10.1186/s12961-021-00744-8.

3. 3 Hasan Bakhshi, ‘The Impact of the “Valuing Culture” Debates in the UK, 2003–2011’, Cultural Trends 21, no. 3 (1 September 2012): 213–14, doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2012.698482; Claire Donovan and Magnus Gulbrandsen, ‘Introduction: Measuring the Impact of Arts and Humanities Research in Europe’, Research Evaluation 27, no. 4 (1 October 2018): 285–86, doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvy019; James Robson, Emily Murphy, Nuzha Nuseibeh, Alice Tawell and Ben Hart, ‘The Value of the Humanities: Understanding the Career Destinations of Oxford Humanities Graduates’, University of Oxford, June 2023, www.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/media_wysiwyg/Oxford%20U%20Value%20of%20Humanities%20report.pdf.

4. 4 Nuala Morse, ‘Patterns of Accountability: An Organizational Approach to Community Engagement in Museums’, Museum and Society 16 (30 July 2018): 171–86, doi.org/10.29311/mas.v16i2.2805; Sharon Macdonald, Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum (London: Routledge, 2020).

5. 5 Arts and Humanities Research Council, ‘Strategic Delivery Plan 2022–2025’, September 2022, www.ukri.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/AHRC-010922-StrategicDeliveryPlan2022.pdf.

6. 6 UK Research and Innovation, ‘Eligible Independent Research Organisations and Catapult Centres’, July 2023, www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/before-you-apply/check-if-you-are-eligible-for-research-and-innovation-funding/eligible-independent-research-organisations/.

7. 7 Arts and Humanities Research Council, ‘Strategic Delivery Plan 2022–2025’.

8. 8 Arts and Humanities Research Council, ‘A Decade of Success’, June 2017, www.ukri.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/AHRC-220721-ADecadeOfSuccess.pdf.

9. 9 Bjrn Gustavsen and Yvind Plshaugen, The SAGE Handbook of Action Research (Online: SAGE, 2015), doi.org/10.4135/9781473921290.

10. 10 Megan Gooch, ‘Lest We Forget: Poppies and Public Commemoration’, UK Research and Innovation, 2018, gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FR006652%2F1.

11. 11 Michael Day, ‘Post Project Review’, Historic Royal Palaces, 2015.

12. 12 Peter Vergo, New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1997); Vikki McCall and Clive Gray, ‘Museums and the “New Museology”: Theory, Practice and Organisational Change’, Museum Management and Curatorship 29, no. 1 (1 January 2014): 19–35, doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2013.869852.

13. 13 14–18 NOW, ‘Extraordinary Arts Experiences Connecting People with the First World War’, accessed 29 November 2023, www.1418now.org.uk/.

14. 14 Rowan Light, ‘“Our War”: National Memory, New Zealand and Te Papa’s Gallipoli’, in Reflections on the Commemoration of the First World War, ed. David Monger and Sarah Murray (New York: Routledge, 2020).

15. 15 David C. Harvey and James Wallis, eds., Commemorative Spaces of the First World War: Historical Geographies at the Centenary (London: Routledge, 2017), doi.org/10.4324/9781315651170; Ross Wilson, ‘The Popular Memory of the Western Front: Archaeology and European Heritage’, in Culture, Heritage and Representation : Perspectives on Visuality and the Past, ed. Emma Waterton and Steve Watson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 75–90; Kristin O’Donnell, ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here: Participatory Art and the Mobilisation of First World War Memory in Post-Brexit Britain’, in After the Armistice: Empire, Endgame and Aftermath, ed. Michael J. K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2021); Lucy Noakes and James Wallis, ‘The People’s Centenary? Public History, Remembering and Forgetting in Britain’s First World War Centenary’, Public Historian 44, no. 2 (2022): 56–81, doi.org/10.1525/tph.2022.44.2.56; Jenny Kidd and Joanne Sayner, ‘Unthinking Remembrance? Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red and the Significance of Centenaries’, Cultural Trends 27, no. 2 (2018): 68–82; D-M Withers, ‘Wounding Poppies: Hyper-Commemoration and Aesthetic Interventions’, Critical Military Studies 6, no. 3–4 (2020): 429–33, doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2019.1575123.

16. 16 Emma Hanna, Lorna M. Hughes, Lucy Noakes, Catriona Pennell and James Walli, ‘Reflections on the Centenary of the First World War: Learning and Legacies for the Future’, 2021, reflections1418.exeter.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Reflections-on-the-Centenary-of-the-First-World-War-Learning-and-Legacies-for-the-Future.pdf.

17. 17 14–18 NOW, ‘Extraordinary Arts Experiences’.

18. 18 David Cameron, ‘Speech at Imperial War Museum on First World War Centenary Plans’, Imperial War Museum, 11 October 2012, www.gov.uk/government/speeches/speech-at-imperial-war-museum-on-first-world-war-centenary-plans.

19. 19 Andrew Mycock, S. Sumartojo and B. Wellings, ‘The Centenary to End All Centenaries’, in Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, ed. Andrew Mycock, S. Sumartojo and B. Wellings (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), 1–24.

20. 20 Andrew Mycock, ‘The First World War Centenary in the UK: “A Truly National Commemoration”?’, The Round Table 103, no. 2 (4 March 2014): 153–63, doi.org/10.1080/00358533.2014.898489.

21. 21 S. Mcleod, Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, Tom Duncan, Ceri Jones and Alexandra Gaffikin, ‘Prisoners, Punishment and Torture: Developing New Approaches to Interpretation at the Tower of London’, Historic Royal Palaces and University of Leicester, January 2014.

22. 22 Joanne Sayner, ‘The Significance of the Centenary’, UK Research and Innovation, 2013, gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FK005413%2F1.

23. 23 The Advisory Board included Dr Joanne Sayner, Dr Jenny Kidd, Michael Day (former CEO), Dr Silke Arnold-De Simine and heritage consultant and interpretation expert Dr Polly Richards.

24. 24 Michael Day, ‘“Agile”—A Future Leadership Model for Museums?’, speech presented at the Agile Museum, Tokyo, 14 January 2015, agilemuseum.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/agile-leadership-tokyo-2015-md-script-1.pdf.

25. 25 Andrew Dewdney, David Dibosa and Victoria Walsh, Post Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum (New York: Routledge, 2013).

26. 26 Pulsar, ‘Audience Intelligence’, accessed 29 November 2023, www.pulsarplatform.com/.

27. 27 Cf. Ann-Marie Foster and James Wallis, ‘The Memorial Afterlives of Online Crowdsourcing’, Public History Review 30 (2023), doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8048.

28. 28 Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘Radical Histories, Emotional Legacies, and Everywhere in between? Exploring Everyday Responses to the Traumas of War in Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red’, Mortality, forthcoming.

29. 29 J. Lynne Teather, ‘Museum Studies: Reflecting on Reflective Practice’, Museum Management and Curatorship 10, no. 4 (December 1991): 403–17, doi.org/10.1080/09647779109515291.

30. 30 ‘Beyond the Deepening Shadow: The Tower Remembers’, Historic Royal Palaces, 2018, www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/whats-on/the-tower-remembers/.

31. 31 House of Commons, ‘Lessons from the First World War Centenary’, report, together with formal minutes relating to the report, Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, 10 July 2019.

32. 32 Jenny Kidd and Joanne Sayner, ‘Unthinking Remembrance? Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red and the Significance of Centenaries’, Cultural Trends 27, no. 2 (2018): 68–82.

33. 33 Ruth McGinity and Maija Salokangas, ‘Introduction: “Embedded Research” as an Approach into Academia for Emerging Researchers’, Management in Education 28, no. 1 (1 January 2014): 3–5, doi.org/10.1177/0892020613508863; Shannon K. McManimon, ‘Embedded Research Practices: Practice as Process, Participatory Method, and Product in Informal Learning Research’, Journal of Museum Education 46, no. 2 (3 April 2021): 245–54, doi.org/10.1080/10598650.2021.1891757.

34. 34 Daniel Neyland, Organizational Ethnography (London: SAGE, 2007); Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, ‘Who’s Afraid of Oral History? Fifty Years of Debates and Anxiety about Ethics’, Oral History Review 43, no. 2 (1 September 2016): 338–66, doi.org/10.1093/ohr/ohw071.

35. 35 Gregory Hollin and Ros Williams, ‘Complicity: Methodologies of Power, Politics and the Ethics of Knowledge Production’, Sociology of Health & Illness 44, no. S1 (2022): 1–21, doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13575.

36. 36 Samira Shackle, ‘The Backlash: How Slavery Research Came under Fire’, Guardian, 1 June 2023, www.theguardian.com/news/2023/jun/01/cotton-capital-legacies-of-slavery-research-backlash-cambridge-university.

37. 37 Eleanor O’Keeffe, social media manager, 2019, LWF.

38. 38 Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘The 31-Thousand Hands of Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red: Lessons from “Mega Event” Public History in the First World War Centenary’, under review.

39. 39 ‘Historic Royal Palaces’ Research Strategy 2022–2027’, n.d.

40. 40 Historic Royal Palaces, ‘About Us’, accessed 14 February 2023, www.hrp.org.uk/about-us/.

41. 41 Eleanor O’Keeffe, ‘Radical Histories, Emotional Legacies, and Everywhere in between? Exploring Everyday Responses to the Traumas of War in Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red’, Mortality, doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2024.2310102.

42. 42 As HRP does not possess a business archive or research repository for these kinds of data, let alone one that could be publicly accessed, the IRO embedded model is the only way for it to share its knowledge with other stakeholders.

43. 43 UK Research and Innovation, ‘Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)’, 7 February 2023, www.ukri.org/councils/ahrc/.

44. 44 UK Research and Innovation, ‘REF 2028: Initial Decisions and Issues for Further Consultation’, accessed 29 November 2023, www.ukri.org/publications/ref2028-initial-decisions-and-issues-for-further-consultation/.