Projects

2020   Conquered by No One

Published in October 2020,  50 writers, have collaborated to bring to life a ‘people’s history’ of the Barons and nobles who sealed the 1320 letter, known as the Declaration of Arbroath, that was intended to confirm Scotland’s status as an independent sovereign state. The book, Conquered by No One, was edited and coordinated by Neil McLennan with some of the chapters written by direct descendants of the 1320 Nobles. The book is very much a people’s history bringing together for the first time the stories, motivations and viewpoints of those who collaborated to sign the Declaration of Arbroath.

The Urban Historian wrote one of the chapters, and has provided the dedicated website for the book and is looking after the main social media accounts for the publication.  conqueredbynoone.theurbanhistorian.co.uk

2017 – The Year of History, Heritage & Archaeology

2017 was a very busy year.   We were commissioned by two Paisley Heritage projects to carryout historical research.

Project 1 – The Renfrewshire Tapestry Group  We have been commissioned to create a historical timeline for the old County of Renfrew that today includes Inverclyde, East Renfrewshire, Renfrewshire and parts of Glasgow.  on top of the research we will also be running historical workshops with local historians in the respective counties to make sure we have accurate timelines.   See  www.renfrewshiretapestry.org.uk for full details.

Project 2 – A Family of Threads  We have been commissioned to research the growth of the thread industry in Renfrewshire from 1722 and the introduction of fine linen thread manufacturing, through to the rise of the Coats and Clarks empires.   See www.afamilyofthreads.info for full details.  This is a Paisley Thread Mill Museum project.

Paisley Thread Mill Museum 2016

We completed a digitisation project for Paisley Thread Mill Museum.  In all we have scanned nine photograph Albums of Coats & Clarks Thread Mills around the world.  Once the scanning was complete we had to separate each image on the scanned pages.  The final count of images was 906 all of which have been catalogued separately with descriptions.

The second step is to add the description to the JPG Comment in the image files, and then update a Multimedia Touchscreen package that displays the images in the museum.  This is an ongoing project.

Renfrewshire History/ archaeologyIT

The Renfrewshire History website (www.renfrewshirehistory.info) has now been integrated into the Urban Historian website. Details of classes and heritage walks are now being published on the Urban Historian website, and we are currently working on the last issues with the integration – essentially links on our interactive heritage map to relevant articles.  We hope to have this work sorted by March 2017.

archaeologyIT continues to supply hosting and website design/ maintenance to local and national heritage bodies. We have recently updated the look and feel of the Places of Worship in Scotland website (www.scottishchurches.org.uk) for SCHR Ltd, as part of our ongoing maintenance and design contract.

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