The Innovation Lab Histories of Ordinary People is one of several innovation labs within the HAICu consortium. Its concrete aim is to strengthen cooperation between archival institutions and academic research — not as a one-directional knowledge transfer, but as a working partnership in which the questions, the source corpora, and the methodological choices are negotiated jointly.
The lab takes its name and its orientation seriously: ordinary people are massively over-represented in the surviving administrative archive (petitions, court records, tax registers, parish records) and massively under-represented in the historiography that uses it. The HTR/ATR infrastructure now in place, together with metadata and entity-recognition tooling, makes it possible to take that imbalance seriously at corpus scale. Co-leading this lab is, for me, the part of the HAICu work that most directly engages the GLAM-side of the field.