Dialect and Heritage website | Ammba Digital

Results

Digital experience

Produced a contemporary digital experience with striking design features

Engaged audiences

Developed a range of interactive features designed to entertain audiences and encourage the submission of archival content

Grew archives

Provided the Dialect and Heritage with a tool that they can use to communicate their project, grow their archives and attract audiences

Objectives

To develop a website for the Dialect and Heritage project, which is run by the School of English at the University of Leeds. Funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the project’s aim was to share the University’s Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture digitally. This collection is a unique visual and aural record of the dialect, culture, and beliefs prevalent in19th and 20th Century.

As language is a growing, living thing, the project team was keen that this digital experience not only presented archive collections, but also provided the opportunity to collect new dialects from audiences.

Similarly, it was important that the site should be as interactive as possible. This would encourage a range of different digital audiences to engage and generate their own content.

Solutions

To meet the project objectives, we developed a site in Wordpress. This gave us the flexibility to develop a range of branded modular content blocks that would provide an engaging digital experience. This can be seen in the themed articles which act as interesting and eye-catching introductions into specific topics. Strong use of colour and a magazine aesthetic across the site add to this.

The site contains a number of interactive features that encourage users to engage with the site and contribute dialect and sayings:

Interactive tools

Great Dialect Hunt – a fun questionnaire that asks users to choose colloquial terms for everyday things
Your words – an opportunity for users to upload dialect and sayings in audio format around specific themes
Immersive soundscape – users can submit audio clips for inclusion in an immersive experience
Dialect quiz – enables users to guess the weird and wonderful terms used for different everyday objects

Site integrations

A number of these interactive elements were achieved using a third party tool called Iszy. Integrating Iszy into the site enabled users to submit content and the Dialect and Heritage team to harvest it for their archives.

Audio map

Lastly, the site features a fascinating Sound Map. This map of the U.K. contains many interactive pins. By clicking a pin, the user can listen to an audio clip taken from the archives. It’s a great way for users to explore the collection in an interactive and fun way.

Collecting dialect