Adventures in tagging: local history in East London

Purpose – This paper aims to describe the development of an online project in East London about local history. Design/methodology/approach – The approach to the paper has been to combine the experience of building and developing a live online community of practice (around the subject of local history in East London) with both established historical theory and the emergence of self‐publishing “history from below”. Findings – The project has revealed that the classification of history at a local level requires a detailed understanding of the theory of history, issues about classification of history, and the need to create a classification scheme that is usable in the context of user‐generated content. Originality/value – The online project has been live for around 18 months. In this time, over 440 people have contributed almost 5,000 original posts. They have created a strong online community presence and there has been work to classify the contributions by professional and amateur historians and local people who are recording their personal memories.