TapeLetters

If you want to chat to a far distant member of your family these days  it's easy to fire up your messaging app of choice to get in touch with pretty much any part of the world. But in the past, before the days of smart phones and internet messaging, and if you were part of a community that didn't have a history of using written language to communicate, the way to get yourself heard would be to make a tape recording and pop it in the post.

TapeLetters examines the communications from just such a situation. Drawing directly both from first-hand interviews and from the informal and intimate conversations on the cassettes themselves, the project seeks to unearth, archive and present a portrait of this method of communication, as practised mainly by Potwari-speaking members of the British-Pakistani community.

We created a website and apps to showcase this fascinating project and we think it was rather great.

In 2023 there was an exhibition of the project in the marketplace in Ashton. We created a progressive web app (PWA) version of the site which could be installed to the tablet devices used in the exhibition space without them needing to be oneline. 

At the end of 2024 The Museum of Edinburgh hosted an updated exhibition of the TapeLetters project for which we created a site specific Scottish version of the website.

We also updated the native Apple and Android apps to include the new stories from Scotland, and created a standalone PWA version of the player for use in schools.