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Working with material from the Sheppey archive

This article reflects on the experience of working with archived data in the Living and Working on Sheppey project which revisited material from Ray Pahl’s research on the Isle of Sheppey, published in the modern sociological classic, Divisions of Labour (1984). The article considers the reasons for revisiting archived material and some of the opportunities and challenges of working with archived material. For this discussion, we focus on one particular element of the original research: a collection of essays written by school leavers in 1978, and the archived notes from Pahl’s preliminary analysis of these data. We also draw on interviews with Pahl about this aspect of his research, and our experience of repeating the essay-writing exercise. We conclude with some comments on the dynamic character of the archive.