Stuart Hall's unpublished writings go online for the first time

Unpublished notes, papers, recordings and videos by Professor Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born thinker widely credited as the father of British cultural studies, are now available online for the first time, thanks to a University of Birmingham project.

The new website, launched this week as part of the Stuart Hall Archive Project, makes the material available to researchers, students and community organisers around the world, "from Birmingham to the Caribbean".

What is in the archive

• More than 3,100 scans and images of pages of writing.
• 950 index cards of notes.
• 56 digitised notebooks from the 1950s to the 1980s.
• More than 24 hours of audio and more than six hours of video from the 1970s and 1980s.

Hall's index cards and his abandoned doctoral thesis are the earliest writings in the archive. A packet of cards titled "Critical Approaches to Mass Culture" appears to be an early outline of the methods of cultural studies, asking questions "preliminary to the development of an aesthetic, a critical approach" to mass culture.

"Unparalleled access"

Dr Rebecca Roach, Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and an expert in digital culture and archives, led the digitisation. She said: "We are delighted to make Professor Hall's archives available to new audiences around the world. As well as providing unparalleled access to the foundational writings that created modern cultural studies, we have also made hours of recordings, and video accessible for the first time."

"This archive material sheds new insights on the inner workings of his academic thought and processes," she said. The website also offers digital tools and responses to the archive from academics, artists and students.

Who was Stuart Hall?

Stuart Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1932 and came to Britain as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He made major contributions to the study of politics, popular culture, the media, society and race, and famously coined the term "Thatcherism" in 1979.

His strongest link to Birmingham was the university's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which he joined in the 1960s and later led as its director. The centre became world famous for taking popular culture, from television and youth subcultures to newspapers, seriously as a subject of study, and its methods are taught in universities around the world. He later became a professor at the Open University, and died in 2014.

Why it matters

Hall's ideas about identity, race and representation shaped debates far beyond universities, influencing artists, film-makers, writers and activists. Making his working notes public lets readers see how those ideas developed, and gives a new generation access to the thinking of one of the most influential intellectuals of post-war Britain.

Black History Month

The launch comes during Black History Month, which Birmingham is marking with events across the city throughout October. Hall's work on the experiences of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain makes the archive a particularly fitting resource for the month.