Annebella has long had an interest in Mass Observation; she first signed up as a writer in the early 1990s. She returned to the archive as a researcher in the mid-2000s and she used the 55,000 photographs of the One Day for Life project - one of Mass Observation's Related Collections - as the basis for her PhD research into mass photographic practice (2006-10), which was published in revised form as Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life (I. B. Tauris, 2015). Since then, Annebella has retained close connections with the archive and its staff, leading workshops for undergraduate, postgraduate and research students, and giving numerous seminar and conference papers and public talks.

In 2009-10, Annebella was Research Fellow on the project Methodological Innovations: Using Mass Observation. This research network was funded by a University of Brighton Research Innovations grant and was co-ordinated by colleagues Mark Bhatti and Louise Purbrick, with the support of Professor Dorothy Sheridan MBE of the Mass Observation Archive. The project established a cluster of researchers in arts, humanities and social sciences interested in using and interpreting the unique accounts of everyday life held in the archive, with the aim of understanding, debating and sharing methods between researchers from a variety of fields, and thereby extending interdisciplinary practice.

As Research Fellow, Annebella helped establish and maintain a lively discussion network of 150 international members; co-organised and contributed to two method and methodology workshops; co-organised and spoke at a sell-out national conference and designed an accompanying display, Making Sense of Everyday Life, as part of Brighton Festival Fringe, 2010. Annebella's research, building on this project, received an award in the University of Brighton Research Poster competition in 2011 and is the subject of two academic journal articles (History Workshop Journal, 2013 and Sociological Research Online, 2014).

Annebella continues her interests in Mass Observation; from 2018 she will be a participant, with Prof David Amigoni (Keele), on Rachel Hurdley's British Academy / Cardiff University project exploring early sociological engagements with visual methodologies.