 My name is Damien Murphy, Professor of Sound and Music Computing at the University of York, and I'm also Director of a project called XR Stories, Creative Industries, R&D Partnership, and my talk is about digital creativity and the future of storytelling, and it's an opportunity to reflect on some of the work that I've done at the university in collaboration with many colleagues around creativity, digital creativity, and that's led to the XR Stories project and how this is changing or shifting some of the research that we do and the culture of research at our institution and with four our colleagues, we hope. So just over six years ago, maybe five, six years ago, the University of York launched a new strategy and that's for research and that strategy was focused on seven themes of activity, multidisciplinary activity under which our work could become focused, and one of those themes was creativity, and I was lucky and privileged enough to be the research theme champion for creativity, and it was a huge opportunity to work with many brilliant colleagues over the last five years. I've just stepped down from that role and there's a new cohort of research champions who are taking over from now, and so it is an excellent opportunity to reflect back on what this theme has meant and what maybe has changed as a consequence of our work and endeavours over the last five years. And so when we set out to sort of explore the themes, creativity at York emerged from 50 years where we're still quite a new university of interdisciplinary collaboration and we recognise that creativity is a key driver of modern dynamic societies and it's at the centre of all aspects of our research excellence at the university. Certainly it was a theme that I felt all colleagues could be part of because fundamentally research, teaching, learning is a creative endeavour. In particular our research work is considered the nature of creativity, the creative process across linguistic and cultural aesthetic and cognitive dimensions, but in particular we were starting to realise back then there was a particular emphasis or interest in research at the convergence of technology, digital games, interactive media and how we could work with leading partners, individuals, creatives, organisations in the creative economy to try and deliver new experiences that would provoke, inform and entertain for the wider benefit of our society. And again this work was based on perhaps 30 years of activity in my own discipline which is sound and music computing and music technology and this was based on a collaboration between our music department and our engineering department based on a common language and a common interest in research, practice, collaboration between the two disciplines and how computers ultimately and engineering methods could be used to meet the needs of composers of many aspects of that 30 year period. And so that project music technology is one of the key areas that has sort of emerged from York over that particular period of time and indeed it's helped, it's given me my position at the university over that period of time as well. And perhaps more recently that's been made manifest in a fairly new department although it's 10 years old now, department of theatre film, television and interactive media which you can see on the right hand side there and indeed that's a fundamentally multi-disciplinary department founded on creatives, scholars, researchers working across theatre film and television, production and post-production and interactive media effectively computer science. And so it's a fundamentally multi-disciplinary department that brings together arts and humanities research practice collaborating with computer science and engineering to understand and inform new forms of creative research. And so I just want to talk about some of the particular interesting projects that I've emerged over the last few years as part of the creativity theme to give a wider sense of how colleagues and projects have identified with that particular subject area. One of which was an example of archaeological creativity and this is an 11,000 year old pendant, the earliest known example of Mesolithic art in Britain that was found at a site not too far from the University of York on the Yorkshire Coast or near the Yorkshire Coast called Starr Cart and colleagues in archaeology worked to interpret and explore and examine this beautiful piece of work which you can see here on the screen and it has these very, very fine indentations and engravings and they use 360 degree lighting techniques and computer visualisations in order to explore, visualise, render and make, you know, realistic what this piece of art looks like and particularly from the point of view of being able to talk about it and write about it in their publications and so there's a really interesting publication there in the Journal of Internet Archaeology where that piece of work is particularly explored and you can see some of the methods that they use to render the pendant beyond just traditional 2D imaging and 2D representation to explore and give the reader a sense of what it looks like and what it means and the importance of this artefact for our archaeological understanding of our country. If we move from the Department of Archaeology to the Department of History and the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture this small research centre uses computer visualisations, animation, film to reveal the architecture, culture and history of the cathedrals, churches and the heritage sites around the UK and that's about interpretation and it's about communication and understanding but it's also about what the methods and techniques used in deploying those visualisations ultimately reveal for the core researchers working in the history and architecture and the archaeology of these sites, what they reveal about those sites which is new and couldn't have been explored through without using these methods as part of their practice. And colleagues in archaeology are also using computer visualisations in a project called the Four Mountains Test and this is a means of simple and non-invasive detection of early onset Alzheimer's and it's based on sets of landscape visualisations that focuses on as you can see in this slide here an arrangement of four mountains and the test consists of giving the subject a set of four images in series where three of those images are the same mountain range but rendered using different lighting conditions to reflect different time of day, different seasons of the year different viewer perspectives on that particular scene and one on the fourth picture then is a slightly different change version of it but ultimately it's not the same landscape and this helps to give an early potential detection of Alzheimer's because the way that Alzheimer's affects hippocampus affects our spatial perception of the world around us and makes that task of identifying four similar but three the same one different images all the more challenging and so it's a really interesting project and that relates to how imaging can be used for diagnostic testing in disease and could potentially transform early diagnosis options for what is a terrible disease and you can find out more about the project at the link there on the Four Mountains Test. But we also work with our city and we work with cultural organizations and we work with artists and the York Curious Project was a collaboration between History of Art and many of the cultural centres in York to explore the city through contemporary art installations and the idea here was to move away from the traditional iconic aspects of heritage that exists in our city to think about its past and the environment in different ways through colour, texture and word and we work with again colleagues in history, archaeology and History of Art to explore aspects of the city in different ways and to build hidden aspects of contemporary art in the city for the visitors to explore in a different way and one of the other big projects at the university something called Digital Creativity Laboratory itself is a team of multidisciplinary researchers working in many different aspects of digital media and storytelling and this particular project which we call Viking VR they worked with Yorkshire Museums Trust as part of a big exhibition that in yourself was a partnership with the British Museum that explored and displayed contents from a number of Viking hordes as part of a major touring exhibition and there was a particular challenge set to the colleagues in DC Labs, Digital Creativity Labs as to how these artefacts these aspects in the collection could be translated into experiences and to use virtual reality to render those experiences for visitors as part of the exhibition and so the project brought together again archaeologists, animators, sound designers, user experience researchers scholars of literature to help bring to life the scenes related to these collections and the great Viking army when they were camped at Torxie and Lincolnshire around 872 AD and so it was a huge and significant and difficult project to try and manage and tell the story of these pieces in a way that was going to be meaningful and deliver effective and learning experiences that could work for hundreds of people through the exhibition a day and some of the challenges around that is how you deliver a virtual reality experience that's going to work in a museum context and so that enabled us to build these beautiful masks that you see on the right hand side of the screen which have a VR headset embedded within them and they could be used day in and day out and how they could then translate into new novel experiences that could be shared by all the visitors to the museum and give them shared experiences as part of that so part of the research was also in the user experience for this project because virtual reality if you strap yourself in a VR headset can be quite an isolating experience we wanted to make it a more shared experience so that families could explore it together so that was a very interesting and rewarding project to work on and so perhaps what's emerged out of some of these wonderful projects that I've had experience of working with colleagues on over the last sort of five years is they do all feature digital aspects as part of the core work and so that led then more recently to work on what would digital creativity look like at York and what might it look like in our future so we worked on consulting widely across our whole sort of community of researchers, scholars, professionals at the university to understand what part it plays in their work and with a view to looking to our future and our aim then now is to build a community of interdisciplinary researchers actively researching creativity in all its forms that's embracing and supported by core technology digital tools and methods that both inform and influence new research as well as enhance existing research output so it's about core research but also supporting existing research and to enable collaborative research both within for the creative industries, the cultural sector and all the relevant external partners where there are shared economic culture and societal goals for the wide benefit and public good because many of the projects that I've cited so far are all about collaboration and working with external partners and so the basis of this strategy then was four principles that we would like to work on in the future the key importance of interdisciplinarity in our work which was one of the original sort of aims of the original research themes we want to invest in skills training and support services to enable that change for as wide a part of the community as possible we feel it's important to have a place within the community a place where colleagues can come together and share their experiences and work on things together and articulate new questions of research around these experiences but of course there's also challenges around what we mean by a place within the university now and we've all been learning to work in different ways over the last 12 months because of Covid and of particular relevance to that as well is partnership as part of that partnership outside of our university and other universities and how the work that we do can be part of the community renewal we would like to see post Covid so that gives a sense of where we've come from and some of the work that's ongoing at our institution around creativity and how that's informed then our strategy for digital creativity and maybe we'll come back to some of these points for the future as part of the Q&A but I want to talk a little bit now in the last five minutes or so a presentation about a particular project that's emerged out at this time which is the XR Stories project and this is one particular project that has a significant focus on digital creativity and the future of storytelling it's one of nine significant large investments or projects around the UK from AHRC to support and develop work for the creative industries working with universities it has a focus on what's called clusters of activity that's a cluster in terms of the creative sector within which you're working and the region in which that creative sector is particularly active and the map on the right-hand side of the screen shows the one, two, three, four, five, six, eight projects and then what's also called the policy and evidence centre which sits underneath all of the regional projects to try and draw together some of the evidence that we're gathering about how R&D in universities helps and supports the creative industries and XR Stories is focused on Yorkshire and Humber and their screen industries cluster which is a significant area and region of activity supporting the film, television and games industries across a diverse region of the country that we identify as Yorkshire but actually consist of many different counties and regions and at the heart of this activity at the heart of the screen industries cluster in Yorkshire and Humber are two organisations Screen Yorkshire that supports investment and production in film and TV in the region supported in turn by the British Film Institute and indeed the XR Stories project is a partnership between the University of York Screen Yorkshire and the BFI and you see there some of the brilliant content that has emerged recently from Yorkshire and Humber production companies and locations in both film and television and then also associated with the activities of Screen Yorkshire and the British Film Institute is one of the largest games networks outside of London and the South-East called Game Republic and again there's a huge community of small to medium to large companies working in the games industry around various sort of cities and regions of Yorkshire and Humber and XR Stories focuses all this activity to try and establish the Yorkshire and Humber screen industries cluster as the UK centre of excellence in immersive and interactive digital storytelling no less than the future of storytelling and storytelling is at the heart of everything that we try and do as part of the XR Stories project so what does the future of storytelling look like well from my perspective I can go back to my sort of idea of what the future of storytelling was like when I was growing up and for me it was books like The Choose Your Own Adventure series which then led on to the Fighting Fantasy series of books and ultimately these are books where you're able to to some degree choose your path through some form of branching narrative giving you the reader some kind of agency in the story to hopefully succeed in solving a series of problems and get the best outcome of course I was never quite satisfied with that and I would always be reading those books with a finger in each page I think that was trying to look at the best possible option to get me through to the end of the story and of course nowadays that kind of branching narrative based storytelling has been supported and replaced by technology so for XR Stories and the future of storytelling is about research in that particular area and colleagues work in industry in that particular area focused on two core areas which is virtual reality and related technologies and then interactive storytelling so I've already mentioned some of the work we've done for instance with Viking VR in terms of what VR technology might be or what it might offer in terms of interactive media that's still quite new outside of the games industry but probably the most famous example of this in television in recent years was Bandersnatch the Black Mirror series where you could again choose your own adventure or choose your own path through the story by making decisions at particular points and the XR Stories project is fundamentally for our companies in the region to support them in their work and endeavours in the future of storytelling through the research and development work that we're doing in Yorkshire and Humber universities so as an example of some projects that we've supported over the last two years so XR Stories is its midway point we've been two and a half years in and we've got another two and a half years to go one project is led by Opera North working with the University of York and they had a production just a year ago actually of Benjamin Britten's Turn at the Screw and they were interested and are fundamentally interested in expanding their audiences to bring in new and younger audiences into this old and traditional form of storytelling and so rather than doing the usual approach for a trailer for their production which would be a filmed version of production on stage they work with a number of companies and our researchers at the University of York to build this beautiful interactive immersive 360-degree trailer that allowed you to explore particular scenes from the opera and listen to the performers render that out in lots of different ways as of January last year when it went live it had nearly 100,000 views and most interestingly from those views 2,000 people or more than 2,000 people have booked tickets the trailer itself is about advertising but it's also a way of tracking data through to see who watches the trailer and then goes on to buy a ticket and can we understand the demographic of that audience to understand what the impact of such a shift in how we market ourselves is to the audiences that we get and so we did some work focus grouping this and of a group of young people 60% agreed strongly that the trailer made them more interested in seeing live opera and only 4% said that the trailer had not changed their idea of what that art form was about and for opera north it's been hugely important as well they've seen it as a completely new way to think about reaching new audiences it's led to a shift in their marketing outlook and to involve participatory techniques again to reach out to audiences and that's also resulted in the doubling of their investment in digital engagement particularly post-COVID when of course it's so hard for the live performance industry to again make sure that they're relevant and reaching audiences and continuing to do their work at a time when audiences are not possible traditional audiences that is the Rising Tide of the Humber is a project between the University of Hull and a small company called BetaJester and they've worked together to develop an immersive VR story world to visualize how historic flood affected the city in the 17th century it's based around the poet Andrew Marvell who wrote about the event 400 years ago and they've developed a 360 degree VR video as an immersive experienced and transports the user back to the time of the flood BetaJester developed a model in collaboration with maps, archival evidence, archaeological evidence and worked with the University's Energy and Environment Institute to understand what the flooding effect would have been at that particular time in history and the idea again is to allow users to experience Hull as it would have been in the 17th century and discover what caused the flood in the eyes and the words of the poet Andrew Marvell and finally from the XR Stories project as a brief introduction to what we're doing this is a project between again our colleagues at DC Labs at the University of York Bright White which were a York based interactive media company and the Science and Media Museum in Bradford and it's about it's called responsive interpretive storytelling and it's using a combination of vision, sound, AI, holographic display to deliver the right story about particular artifacts to the right audiences at the right time and in particular here the object is the BBC Marconi AXBT microphone which probably has a limited audience of interest in its own right but of course when one learns about the role that that artifact has played over the life and development of the BBC's broadcast to the country and to the world the stories it has literally heard suddenly it becomes a very very interesting artifact aside from its abilities as a microphone and from that then a whole possible world of stories and interpretation become possible and the audience is for those stories and the final thing that I want to mention is a project that emerged a little bit out of the creativity theme from colleagues at our library and IT service at the University of York which is called Digital Creativity Week and this was about engaging with students across our organization to engage with the potential for what digital creative tools mean for them and also engaging with the collections in our library and archives and also with the city and so the course of a week a whole cross-section cohort of students come together learn about coding learn about digital editing, image editing sound editing and the tools to author digital media content and by the end of the week they need to have found something that engages them that relates to the city and relates to our collections and they have to put on a series of art installations by the end of the week which is then open to the wider members of the university community it's a wonderful, wonderful project it's been a very satisfying thing for me to be personally involved with and to see some of the work that's emerged from that and everybody's had a lot of fun along the way so thank you very much for listening that gives a sense and a flavor of some of the work that we're doing at the University of York and have done and what XR stories might mean in terms of the future of storytelling and very happy now to have questions and have a bit of a discussion thank you thank you Damien that was really fascinating and just some really lovely examples of projects bringing digital creativity into practice there's some questions starting to come through now if anybody has any questions if you could note them in the Q&A function I'll kick off with a question if I might so how might we grow a wider pool of digital creatives who are able to embrace some of these opportunities that's a really good and interesting question it's something that we've reflected on a lot certainly because we felt as part of doing the digital creativity strategy work there was a sense of if you're inside the wall as it were and you understand the tools, the technology and the language around this idea of media convergence then that can be quite alienating to those who don't necessarily understand it as their core work and so I think collaboration and that interdisciplinarity part that I mentioned a number of times is core to that particularly around research and developing a common language and a common understanding of what might be possible and then the other part of that I think which has particularly come out through the aspects of the digital creativity week and also from our strategy work is developing skills around that actually you know coding skills as well and how understanding the digital language of code can ultimately transform what you're able to do and the questions that you might ask because there's an additional depth and layer to the understanding behind the questions that open up new worlds and new questions new avenues of research ultimately there's a question come through about digital poverty are there any issues around that here and can we ensure that we're not franchising some audiences? Yeah, clearly that's a huge issue and I think it's a huge issue that we've had to deal with in many aspects of our lives over the last 12 months in particular it's an issue that we've had to think about in terms of all aspects of our teaching and learning at the university and universities across the country and wider and it's not something that we should shy away from but I guess at the other side of that in terms of it's looking at how we can support particularly our institutions those individuals who don't have access to such you know tools, technologies a place to do this and again that came through I guess in some of our work and what we didn't want to do is to create another sort of silo of activity that again is separating out those who are not able to access for whatever reason what might be again a really open door for their future potential and so for us again it was really core to work and engage with particularly our libraries and archives and IT services as being the central place that people can access to enable them to again find what's right for them and to get the support they need to be able to do this kind of work and that might be as simple as booking a laptop out of the day it might be learning how to code it might be accessing our network as best they can to enable them to do the basic work they need to do so it's not going to go away but at the same time I think clearly it's a huge issue that we need to get better at because we are changed by the last 12 months in terms of how we engage and work digitally with one another thank you thinking about some of the tools that you've mentioned are there any issues with long-term preservation yeah absolutely that's one of the particular challenge really is as so much of this is embedded in the tech sector and the provision of tools and technologies and software to enable this work to happen and that then is subject to the whim of the market and whether a company is successful or not long term so there's huge issues about how one preserves and archives both the content and then develops skills and tools and technologies that are translatable across different media, different platforms different software and so again I guess that's part of what we're trying to encourage in terms of digital skills is that we're not teaching people to use particular things we want them to have a common language understanding and ability so those skills become translatable and future proof them slightly and so yeah and there's also big questions in terms of how we then preserve and archive particularly all these new experiences that are being developed for very bespoke and not very common to the virtual reality and similar platforms and how then we think about keeping them for future generations and translate them into the next sort of media platforms that come along. Lots of issues around that certainly. Yeah thank you and there's a question from Kevin Grist that sparked echo of immersive storytelling where community groups and non-technical experts have had a major input and the question really is how accessible might this become in the future? Yeah let's see if I can think of a particular example I suppose at the moment in the projects that we're working on in relation to dealing with community we're sort of working with community groups to understand their stories and using those who are expert in the media to translate those stories into experiences. Again there are issues about how that technology then translates into those communities and so we get back to an access issue and how we enable others to explore that but I think it's also about translating the skills down to the individuals in the community so that they can don't need gatekeepers to the platforms and the technologies to tell their own stories I think that's really really important and that will only develop as the technology and it's still a very new medium it's interesting that for instance there aren't many examples of interactive film and television the Band of Snatch forms are great big high-platform high-profile experiment but it hasn't necessarily spawned lots of copycats and so there's still lots of risk associated with these new media platforms and these new storytelling experiences and what they might be so there's a long way to go I think before they become commonplace and so there's roles for us in the privileged positions in our institutions to bring as many people along with that story and to tell their stories as we can. There's a question about COVID and how do you think the cultural sector could benefit from some of these initiatives and tools you've described to help with their recovery and perhaps find new audiences? That's a huge question and a really important one I think from two of the XR Stories projects I can cite examples of the turn of the screw opera north project happened just before lockdown last year but clearly what they learned from developing a new form of interactive trailer in terms of engaging audiences has informed how they approach their digital strategy as an organisation post-COVID the example from the Science and Media Museum has asked to shift considerably because that was designed to be a live exhibition that was going to go up last year and of course that hasn't happened so it's still unclear as to how that project will actually roll out and become something and meaningful whether it will change to be a digital and online experience only. Another really interesting and quite high profile example of this that was in the news recently is the work of the Shakespeare Company and there's another big parallel set of projects to the AHRC Creative Clusters projects called the audience of the futures projects which are industry-led projects that are exploring again immersive and interactive storytelling and the Royal Shakespeare Company were have been leading on digital engagement with Shakespeare content and using digital platforms and clearly they had a plan to deliver something around I think it was a Midsummer Night's Dream last year but of course that all had to change and so but they've taken the learning that they were doing in the development of the digital aspects of that work and that performance to be an online only experience which is going live in March and there was a lot of press talking about it last week and it's very high profile very important events are going to get your tickets and go and explore what a Midsummer Night's Dream might be digitally and online so yeah I think it's hugely important and of course again we still want to go back to live shared experiences but new experiences are coming out of this and it will change how these organisations work and hopefully protect them somewhat against similar challenges in the future. Thank you there's quite a few questions that are coming in about in relation to the pandemic so how have you considered how to support digital creatives in the wake of the pandemic what additional support they might need? Yeah that's an interesting one and a big question I don't you know I think the work that we've done in XR Stories has been okay so an example here is the work that we've done in XR Stories and most of the companies that we've been working with so far are technology focused probably from more of the games industry than film and TV and they've been able to adapt quite well to the restrictions of lockdown and home working in a way that film and TV production again has been written about quite a lot in the press in terms of film and TV production has found more challenging and also the nature of the content that they produce means that there's a digitally online audience that they can market to and sell to that's already there but we're concerned that again it comes back to questions of digital poverty and the common language and understanding of what the potential is for this medium I suppose there is it's been harder to engage more traditional film and TV production companies in the opportunity that such digital media and virtual reality and interactive storytelling means for them and part of that is just the traditional production processing that comes from a commission for a particular program or series of programs and the very tight schedule that then is used to deliver that and to produce it for a particular platform or medium and so in the next coming year we're specifically addressing that by setting up a challenge that's going to be led by a particularly forward thinking media production company to directly challenge the film and TV production companies to think about something different here's some funding here's an opportunity to work with us and to work with our ideas you've got great storytelling chops as it were great storytelling ideas great writers great production teams how would you respond to this challenge which could potentially become a much bigger commission and so that's an example of again trying to encourage creatives to think new ways about what the medium means that then potentially leads them to new audiences and new ways of working and I guess that might not address the issue which might where the question might have been about individual creatives rather than large companies and I think there you know I guess I think from my own experience it's about building online communities of engagement and this is an amazing opportunity this platform here there's a hundred participants I can see and if we've done this in real life in a room somewhere in the UK it would maybe be 10 20 30 40 participants who travel to be able to go to it so there's you know things like zoom although far from satisfactory enable us to reach out to communities in a way that we haven't really had to think about before and I think again that will that will encourage and enable those communities to grow and to support one another and we're not just going to go back to the old ways some hybrid blended model in the future that brings the best of both I would hope thank you and this question about impact and have you done any work to capture the impact of these digital storytelling approaches yeah we have done some and so a couple of examples there at the Viking VR project so part of that was we did a big audience engagement piece to explore people's perceptions of the experiences to explore whether people had engaged with virtual reality technology at all whether this is because it was primarily aimed at families and so this was from I think we saw about 60,000 people go through the exhibition I can't quite remember the numbers but for the majority of people had the experience it was their first time of doing anything in VR and therefore we could get some really valuable feedback on what that experience was like for them or whether they'd returned to something like this and also it although I didn't mention it then it then did inform the next exhibition that was going into the museum and that had a VR aspect as well because clearly it worked really well engaging families and particular audiences and then the other thing of course is the turn of the screw trailer which we did do some data gathering around and particularly they were quite sort of clever about it and it's not just a novel means of engagement let's see how many people buy tickets on the back of watching this trailer and will that inform what we do in the future and that's a really good example of that and I think one of our stories projects is probably a little bit too early to tell now most of the first set of projects are just finishing so we're doing the work now to go back to them and do the evaluation and monitoring work that we need to do to understand what the impact has been from those projects both for the communities they've worked with for the organisations for the businesses and for the academics that have been involved with them as well lots of questions coming in now so there's one from an artist who's creating a geolocated audio installation with interactive sculptures and what would be your tips in terms of where to go for inspiration for projects and ideas? Go and look at Echoes XYZ I think it's called which is a company that does geolocated audio tours they're brilliant and they can help you turn audio content into something that will be interactive geolocated that anybody can use on their phone great idea, great project top tip There's a question about addressing the balance when is it a feeling or perhaps a misconception that digital creativity isn't very academic how can you address that perception? Yeah that's a really good one I would I think there's there's a barrier of perception there in terms of what it means and possibly a barrier of not feeling comfortable in a domain you're not familiar with and being a bit fearful of what you might learn about yourself and the outcomes of working in that new area I can give an example from my own practice which I haven't mentioned previously which is a project with a colleague in Department of History and the work that we did around St. Stephen's Chapel which is part of the Palace of Westminster which was the original seat of the House of Commons which burned down around 1840 and he worked on a project that was looking at the history and the archaeology and the architecture of that space over a considerable number of period of years and as part of that process some beautiful 3D models generated by our colleagues at the Centre for Study of Christianity and Culture but from that we were able to ask questions about the nature of how parliamentarians sat and engaged in that historic House of Commons chamber and from that then we started to realise there were questions about how women engaged with political debate at that time when they were otherwise excluded from particularly the public gallery in the House of Commons and there was a study a project that emerged from that about listening to the commons which was all about particularly how women used to gather in the ventilator space around again listening into debate and what their experience of listening to those debates were and so my colleague John is a historian Tudor historian and suddenly he's working in areas of visualisation oralisation, sound, acoustics that he never would have thought of before and suddenly I'm also as someone who's working an expert in sound I'm working in the politics of women engaging with the political debate at that time and aspects of women's suffrage and the last 200 years of women in politics in the UK and all of this went into the Voice and Vote exhibition in Parliament a couple of years ago which was a tremendous privilege again to work as part of but there was that research relationship between myself and my colleague John and the colleagues who worked on that project was all about communication understanding, shifting perspectives and a lot of talking before we could understand what we could each bring to something new so fundamentally it comes back to the idea of collaboration interdisciplinarity and communication establishing a common ground and from that then new and really exciting opportunities can grow. Thank you. A question about libraries and what libraries might do to transform their offer in support of digital creativity you talked a little bit there about the York example and the great digital creativity is there anything else you think we can do? Well I think one of the interesting things that came out of our digital creative strategy work was where would we want this work to sort of who would we want to own it and if we want to really, again I might hate to use the term develop some kind of levelling up agenda for our institution to bring as many colleagues along as possible with the opportunity that we see a certain number of colleagues have benefited from so far and we felt that the library was actually key to that and key to the strategy was to put in place a project manager and a project manager who would be responsible for building the links between these different communities both within and out with the university and also a research technician or a research engineer who had expertise and a background in the social sciences and the arts and humanities but had the technology and digital skills to be able to translate the ideas that colleagues might come from those disciplines into something where they could again interface with aspects of the collections or the archives or the technology to help those ideas along and to encourage those colleagues to sort of benefit from those findings as well and so for us it was you know it was central that the library is a central part of our university a core pillar of what we offer and to put those individuals in the library means they become for the whole community it was fundamental, it is fundamental to our thinking around how we have a shift in our own home as it were Thank you How can we ensure that storytelling stays at the heart of the work of this work that engenders engagement rather than a focus on doing cool things with tech? Yeah that's a really good question Storytelling is at the heart of everything really and you know the work we're doing about storytelling ultimately there are many more different stories to be told about that work and as human beings telling stories is fundamental to what we do and to how we communicate make sense of the world, explore the world and communicate the world to the people around us so I don't think that's ever going to go away and again maybe it relates back to one of the other examples I gave of how we engage with film and TV companies to take on or explore what this technology means for them and fundamentally it's not even the film and TV production companies we need to gauge with, it's the writers the writers are at the heart of the whole process and the writers who come up with the story ideas and articulate those stories and see them through to whatever final platform they're delivered on be that a book or be that a film or a VR experience they're key to the whole process by again informing I guess we're thinking the production companies they can then inform the writers and the writers can see the opportunities of this medium but without the writers it's just a bunch of technology the stories are at the heart of it and that will never change Have you done any work looking at sustainability of some of these projects or any successful strategies to ensure that projects become more embedded and sustainable That's a really good question and in particular for me and for colleagues who've been working on this at the University of York there's quite a sort of a blurry line between our take on digital creativity and research in that area and digital humanities and in that it's all part of the same piece and I know that there's certainly a lot of work being done in aspects of digital humanities to think about what the impact is of increasing levels of digital technology and our digital footprint and AI engines and data storage and all that means in terms of the wider sustainability and impact of our work in the world so it's not something that's a core focus of for instance XR stories at the moment or the work we're doing as part of our strategy work at the University it might come through as particular sub projects as part of that but I know it's certainly a significant issue in the field more generally and more widely and it's one that we certainly need to address. There's a question about promotion of these projects. What channels have you used? Is it primarily social media or what other solutions have you tried? Yeah that's another really interesting question I think social media of course is really important most of the examples that we've cited so far were ultimately designed to go to a live audience be that a festival be that in an exhibition in a gallery somewhere or be that on a screen for a shared experience and so again that's been had a huge impact on how the projects and the organizations and the companies we work with have responded to that challenge you know a big platform for the creative clusters projects on behalf of the UK and AHRC and so on was the South by Southwest Festival in Austin in Texas because that's one of those big festivals where you know there is a big convergence between technology and storytelling and new experiences and that was a really important shop window effectively for some of the projects that we were developing and the companies who developed them and again that was this time last year when it was one of the first big sort of cultural flags that basically said this is going to be a serious situation that we're dealing with when South by Southwest cancelled around this time last year and so that's again had to mean that they had a huge impact on the companies from the UK and from exiles always were going to go there and so they've had to all shift and pivot on to sort of online means so again I think there's issues around how we promote this how we make it accessible how we engage with those audiences how we preserve those experiences more generally for future people to explore them and experience them and I think a lot of the projects and the companies that we're working with at the moment are thinking about that. Question from an archivist commenting this fascinating possibility for exhibitions but then there can be reluctance amongst some archive was non-traditional solutions from the archaeology case study or any others is there any guidance on making a case to explore this? Yeah that was again a really good and relevant question the Viking VR project was a really good case in point there and that was a huge risk for the Yorkshire Museum to take on what was going to be a really high profile exhibition for them and to give a part of that exhibition floor space away to a digital medium that had never been tried in the context of either that kind of exhibition or the Yorkshire Museum before so it was a huge risk and but it was a risk worth taking and again it was down to a long period of collaboration and communication between the digital creativity labs team at the university and the team at the Yorkshire Museum particularly the digital officer who again those two individuals understood what the potential was here and it was a case then of really sort of taking a long-term planning view on it and really sort of risk checking it at every stage of the process and making sure it was going to work and it was going to deliver and it was going to work day in and day out and it wouldn't stop people going through the exhibition because it was a huge bottleneck for instance and the project almost fell down at the very very last minute because the paint on the masks that we created was not antibacterial and we had to try and source antibacterial paint that was going to be health and safety compliant and put up with 60,000 people over three months going through and handling them so those things it almost all came down at the last minute. I love the spread of questions here so a question for writer are they at a major disadvantage because not many of them have coding skills? That's a really good question I don't think they are because anyone at no point would be want to disenfranchise or those who can't code or can't answer the digital natives or obey with this technology because there's still so much that can be brought to the table in any kind of collaboration or research project but I think there's other advantages that can be brought if you're able to at least appreciate and communicate in that kind of side of the language and the technology and what then it offers that's new to your own practice and so I think that's probably the best sort of way of thinking about it really it's not to replace and it's not to demean anything that an individual brings to again a particular collaboration or a project but it's what can be added to your skill set already and your practice and your experience that you would not be able to have done before that opens up new individuals avenues for you as an individual so I would I don't think you're a writer is at a disadvantage to learn and understand for instance what non-linear narrative might be and how that might be realised for different digital platforms would potentially be a really exciting thing to explore. Thank you. One final question what was Upper North's conversion rate with their traditional style trailers? That's a data question I don't have to be fair but I don't think they tried it before I really think the nature of this type of trailer was to explore that opportunity whereas previously it was a pretty traditional example of let's shoot the production on film on stage make a short film of it cut it up for about a minute and make it available so people got a sense of the excitement it's going to be like don't think they tried it as a specific digital marketing tool before I could be wrong and I'm happy for my colleagues on that project to tell me that I am wrong but I think it was quite a new thing to try this out.