About
Packed with Potential

Who We Are

We are a global community of people who share an interest in uncovering and understanding the lives of Anne Lister and those in her circle with historical context through open, collaborative, and accessible research.

Launched on 12 November, 2019 the Packed with Potential website is a hub for individuals pursuing knowledge to learn, reference, discover resources, contribute to or publish findings, and connect with others.

The Anne Lister Research Summit is an annual online conference we host, bringing people together to share knowledge and develop collaborations across many timezones over the course of three days of presentations, workshops, discussions and other activities.

To learn more about individuals involved with these projects, connect with our Contributors.

Our Mission

Our mission is to promote understanding of Anne Lister and her contemporaries, and elevate their legacies. We share knowledge openly as we discover more about the people and events in Anne Lister’s life, to explore with and learn from each other.

We aim to provide access to information with the lowest barriers of entry allowing people from many different backgrounds with various levels of digital literacy to learn, participate, or utilize the work to enable their own.

Values

Our approach to the research featured on Packed with Potential and the spirit of the Anne Lister Research Summit are aligned with the following values:

We elevate the real people

By focusing on the historical information available in primary sources and interpreting Anne Lister and her correspondents' own words through their journals and letters, we honor their legacies and elevate their stories.

We are inquisitive and respectful

By being open to different perspectives and interpretations of Anne Lister and her contemporaries, we engage in meaningful debate that helps expand our collective understanding of her life and times, enriching the discourse about who they were and their life experiences.

We explore in the open

By sharing our work and processes, we bring visibility and greater access to these historical figures and encourage more people to become interested and knowledgeable about their lives and times.

We support one another

By offering each other our expertise and empathy, we find new collaborators, help each other learn, and expand access and strengthen the quality of research available to all.

These values guide our practices and interactions across the community, in any context, and are further reinforced through the Code of Conduct which we use to ensure we continue to build a respectful community space.