My plan was to then look at objects that similarly referenced other local industries that were within living memory. To help in my search, I had to find out how many industries were relevant to the area and quickly discovered there had been an amazing 32 industries within East Dunbartonshire. If you are doing your own research a good place to start is the EDLC photo archive, http://www.edlcimages.co.uk/archive/ then click on the industries box.
Again if I thoroughly researched all 32 that would also take me to the end of the project! I briefly looked at all thirty-two and selected 7, the 7 then became 3. I’ll briefly outline all 7 but will deal with the final 3 in more detail. Nearly all projects I do start with a pretty wide basis, and through a process of research and editing, they start to become more and more focused. It always sounds clean cut when you write about it, but its far from that in reality, some avenues of research are dead ends and others ‘spider’ more and more connections, but in essence it’s a process of editing, editing and even more editing! It can be to easy to get engrossed in the research part of the project, so its important for me to keep reminding myself that the research should help inform the ‘making’ part of the project.
