Pupils at schools in East Sussex will be producing digital accounts of a day in their life as a record of young people's lives in a digital age.

The 12-month pilot project called Curating Childhoods will create a new digital archive of children's lives from videos and photographs the pupils produce.

It is one of 10 projects around the UK funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of a theme called Digital Transformations, which will examine 'big data' in arts and humanities research.

The material will be gathered by researchers at the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth at the University of Sussex, and housed in its Mass Observation Archive.

Sussex sociologist Professor Rachel Thomson will lead the research.

She said: “At the moment, children and young people use social media to personally record and document their lives on a daily basis, but there are very few contemporary public records of their daily lives.

“The project will open up dialogue between researchers, archivists and young people, asking if it is possible to create ethically sensitive public accounts of children and young people's everyday lives in the digital age. We hope this project will create an important historical record.”