Linked databases of research records of primary documents in named archive collections. Some 30 major collections have been worked on, producing a dataset of over 47,000 records of letters in family and related collections, with the dataset consisting of these 30 interrelated databases. A purpose-designed Virtual Research Environment (VRE) manages the epistolary data and provides tools to assist its analysis. Research questions include: In what ways was whiteness and its ‘others’ re/configured over time? How did people represent such things over time in their letter writing? What resistances and accommodations occurred in different areas of the country and from what people and networks? An important meta-concern is, how can long-term social change best be investigated and what are the problems and possibilities of letter writing in this. In addition to scholarly publications arising from the WWW research, the complete dataset with an extensive editorial apparatus is provided for secondary analysis purposes, published through HRI Online at the University of Sheffield, the U.K.'s leading publisher of primary research materials in the humanities and social sciences (see Related Resources).Whites Writing Whiteness investigates how ideas about ‘race’ in South Africa changed from the 1770s to the 1970s and the role of whiteness in this. It is a qualitative longitudinal research project and its primary data is letter-writing within multi-generational family networks, located in South African archive collections. Such collections are the focus because a supremely serial form of data, consequently enabling detailed investigation of change as it unfolded over the long period the research interrogates. They represent different ethnic origins, language groups, economic circumstances and areas of the country and their contents are not seen in a referential way, as sources of true or distorted facts, but as inscribing a complex representational order.
The principal data collection method has been archival research. It has involved detailed work on over 30 major family and related collections, working on entire collections as well as in close detail on a sample of one in five documents across these collections.
