Rave Music and Rugby Matches: Building Partnerships in the Digital Humanities
Monday November 10th
Arts Two SCR – 5:30pm
In this session, Simon Dixon will reflect on the experience of two recent Cultural Economy Knowledge Exchange projects involving the University of Leicester’s Special Collections department. The first, ‘Changing Industries in Leicester’s Cultural Quarter’, combined archival research on the rise, fall and reinvention of industry in the St George’s area of Leicester with location-aware technology to create a mobile app telling a story of industrial change during the twentieth century. The project, funded as part of the wider AHRC Archives, Assets and Audiences project, was a collaboration between the University Library, Leicester’s Centre for Urban History, a local IT company (Cuttlefish) and an arts organisation (Phoenix). The second project, ‘Crowdsourcing the History of The Leicester Tigers’, piloted a model for crowdsourcing the history of a sporting venue through online and offline methods of community engagement. The objective was to explore how a collaborative project between an archive (University of Leicester Special Collections), arts organisation (Soft Touch Arts) and technology provider (Historypin) could increase audience engagement with all three organisations, thereby creating a replicable model for other sporting venues. After describing the two projects and presenting their digital outputs, Dixon will reflect on lessons learnt and outline the benefits to Digital Humanities research of such cross-sector collaborations.
“Those attending the seminar may like to download the St Georges App via http://leicesterstgeorges.co.uk/ and explore the digital assets created during the Welford Road project at https://www.historypin.org/channels/view/53002.