Thanks to the Erasmus+ KA2 application, we had the opportunity to get to know each other and learn from each other, exchange good practices, and create new international collaborations. Eight partner institutions (from six different countries) organized programs and trips to get to know each other's culture, professional profile, local practices of education, and methodology of knowledge transfer. Our project formed a network of specialized museums. The organizations built new relationships at international, national, and local levels. Explored and shared best practices of museums that work with VET institutions. Encouraged museums to engage in a permanent and structural form of collaboration with VET institutions. We built our museum professionals' capacity to identify the learning potential of cultural objects in a VET context. In addition to the staff of the partner institutions, representatives of other institutions, schools, museums and vocational training organizations were present at these events. International knowledge sharing has been achieved. The aim of the organized programs was to train and develop the participants and their environment. We communicated in English, learned new information about other European countries, organized training events, and several partners also gave presentations in English for an international audience. New contacts have been established between institutions and professionals. The participating institutions were also active at the local level. We contacted and co-operated with several organizations involved in international training about vocational education. Local programs, museum visits, and lesson plans had been prepared. We widened their educational offer, as well as increased and diversified their audience by working out new education sessions or other activities for the target groups in order to strengthen students' professional identities through historical examples. We built VET teachers' capacity for competence-oriented education in a museum context. We provided VET students with opportunities to discover the cultural heritage of their region and acquire key competencies in an innovative and creative way thus increasing learning satisfaction. We promoted our cultural heritage education as a good opportunity for the competencies required by VET curricula by disseminating collected practices and experiences that we learned from pilot sessions and other activities. We examined some IT tools in museums to support VET because this age group is the most skillful in using IT devices and it seems a “special language” in which they communicate, therefore museums should also learn and use this language. Partners achieved their results, practices, and specific methods used at VET heritage education at eight joint staff training. One of them was canceled, because of the pandemic situation, but thanks to partners’ good cooperation, it was made up in combined training. During these training and learning events, participants experienced an increase in their professional confidence and language skills. Training materials were produced and shared in English. Participating in museums designed museum education sessions, projects, and other activities and tested these with groups. These sessions became part of their regular educational offer. Another tangible outcome of the project is the collection of best practices that are shared in a digital publication. We reached in the project more than 50 museum professionals who work with adult audiences or teenagers in VET. We were not able to measure exactly that how many professionals reached by the project indirectly, but in our training events, meetings, travels, and dissemination activities (Facebook, Instagram, websites, prospects, radio reports, informative emails, discussions personally with colleagues and representatives of VET institutions, and with online shared summaries and final publication, etc.) this number approximately has to be more than thousand. Vocational education teachers also were involved in the project. We directly reached more than one hundred of them and indirectly at least one thousand during the three years. Partners worked week by week with VET students, thousands of them were reached during the project. The E-VOKED project also shaped our thinking. It turned our attention to vocational education, VET students, and teachers. In the future, we want to develop as many programs, projects, and lesson plans as possible for vocational schools, because we learned that supporting vocational education is an essential interest for all European countries. Strong relationships have been built with partner organizations, which will be continued after the project. Most of the project’s results were summarized and disseminated in our final publication.

My research project aims to advance our understanding of human-centred design practices within museums that are moving toward a digitally mature condition, in which an increasing proportion of the sector is transforming, due to the tendency of museums to embed digital activity, media, and thinking within museums' practices and organisational structures, strategies and mission. Digital media, activity, and thinking are impacting rapidly on the nature of collections, learning, and services; on audience behaviour and expectations; and on the ways in which museums can fulfil their (new) missions. Museums are not just adopting new technology, but rather they are embedding digital in their vision and strategy, organisational working practices and skills sets, and ways of thinking and decision making. Significantly, museums have started to embrace a significant trend that sees human-centered design practices booming in those innovative industries where digital transformation requires new competences and capabilities, and novel ways of thinking, experimenting, and making to design for effective user (human) experiences and services, and envisioning new organisational strategies. Why is fostering design practices so crucial in the digitally mature museum? And why is studying those emerging practices important? Design practices are both shaping and shaped by the integration of the digital within museum practices and, therefore, inevitably results in and emerges out of the organisational change that ensues (Mason and Vavoula 2020 "Digital Cultural Heritage Design Practice: A Conceptual Framework"). Design is a driving force within a wider landscape of the transformative museum. Design brings into the organisational practices new mindsets, capabilities, and practices that help museums to embrace and deliver change, and pursue (digital) transformation. Human-Centered Design promotes a creative and explorative culture and collaborative working practices, where museum professionals are called upon to actively participate in design activities in collaboration with digital specialists, design consultancies, and stakeholders (including visitors and communities). This is changing internal working practices and design activity, where knowledge is created and shared in new ways, in which new tools are introduced, and workplaces re-configured. Through the first systematic study of design practices in the digitally mature museums I aim to understand these changes, how and why they are affecting and changing museum design practices. This project is driven by a social science approach based on qualitative research and ethnographic observations to conduct a study in/for UK museums. It is an interdisciplinary research project at the intersection of design, digital cultural heritage and organisational studies to (1) overview the landscape of emerging design practices in UK museums and (2) understand how these emerging design practices work, towards (3) establishing theoretical foundations of emerging design practice in the digitally mature museum. This project considers innovation for museums, not only resulting from the adoption of cutting-edge technology, but about creative and explorative culture, and collaborative working practices that are enacted by design.

The increasingly widespread use of Information Technology (IT) in most spheres of human activity since the mid-20th century has facilitated & continues to generate digital electronic natural language text/audio/graphics on a huge scale. Arts & Humanities (A&H) research has benefitted from this in that the volume of such materials available for study has greatly increased. Moreover, other fields like Statistics, Information Retrieval & Data Mining have provided computational tools for analysis/interpretation of data abstracted from these A&H resources. A major aspect of the impact of IT & allied subject areas on A&H research has been the creation of discipline-specific collections via digitisation of legacy materials or synthesis of these with new ones. After several decades' activity, the volume of such collections both in the UK & worldwide is both very large & showing no sign of receding. \nAs the number of domain-specific collections has grown, a variety of conceptual/technical issues having to do with the preservation/re-use of such resources have arisen. \n\nThe AHRC's DEDEFI call focuses on two of them: \n(i) Given that such collections are typically generated in academic environments for academic use & resourced by public funding bodies, how can one ensure their longevity so that the financial/human investment in them is not wasted, i.e. how can they be made sustainable?\n(ii) How can the potential of the collections be extended beyond HE to schools/museums & to the general public, that is, how can they achieve even greater social impact?\n\nThe present application addresses these two issues with respect to an existing AHRC-funded collection, the 'Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English' (NECTE) (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/necte). NECTE amalgamated two legacy databases of Tyneside English, the 'Tyneside Linguistic Survey' & the 'Phonological Variation & Change in Contemporary Spoken English' project, into a single resource. This process conformed to global standards for the documentation/digitisation of such data & was undertaken using the latest IT technology available. NECTE was intended primarily as a resource for academic linguistic/socio-historical research. Since its publication on the Web in 2005, it has been extensively used both by its creators & by other researchers for that purpose. \n\nThis proposal aims to develop NECTE in ways that enhance both its sustainability and impact. In overview, the objective is to augment the corpus content in several respects & to create a new website that supersedes the existing one & makes the content more accessible to academic/non-academic users in ways appropriate to these respective communities. The augmentation comprises updating to the current global documentation standards, linking the corpus with recently collected/digitised Tyneside speech (2007-2009) as well as digitized photographic materials from collections at Beamish (http://www.beamishcollections.com/rrc/photo.asp), the Northern Region Film & TV Archive (http://www.nrfta.org.uk/) & Tyne & Wear Museums & Archives (http://www.tyneandweararchives.org.uk/).\nFor academic users, the new website offers download facilities & documentation that are essentially identical to those of the existing NECTE website, though the latter would be updated to reflect new standards & the changes to the content already described. For non-academic users (especially those in the educational/museum sectors), the website offers topic-based browsing of the resource such that, selecting different menus will present the user with linked audio/text/photographic data. By doing so, we will meet the challenge of preserving/enhancing the value of the Linguistic 'Time Capsule' that is NECTE by using state-of-the-art technologies to accommodate the quite distinctive web searching behaviours & demands of the 'Google Generation' (Kuiper et al. 2008;Nicholas & Rowlands 2008).

This unique consortium draws on the research excellence of interdisciplinary and complementary design innovation labs at three universities - Lancaster University, Newcastle University and the Royal College of Art and connects it with public and private sectors, linking large and small-scale businesses, service providers and citizens. Together, our expertise in developing and applying creative techniques to navigate unexplored challenges includes that of designers, artists, curators, producers, broadcasters, engineers, managers, technologists and writers - and draws on wider expertise from across the partner universities and beyond. The Creative Exchange responds to profound changes in practice in the creative and media-based industries stimulated by the opening of the digital public space, the ability of everyone to access, explore and create in any aspect of the digital space, moving from 'content consumption' to 'content experience'. It explores new forms of engagement and exchange in the broadcast, performing and visual arts, digital media, design and gaming sectors, by focusing on citizen-led content, interactive narrative, radical personalization and new forms of value creation in the context of the 'experience economy'. The primary geographic focus is the Northwest of England centred around the opportunity presented by the growth of MediaCityUK and its surrounding economy. The three universities act as local test beds with field trials in London, Lancaster and Newcastle prior to larger public facing trials in the northwest. This will support the North West regional strategy for growth in digital and creative media industries, whilst generating comparative research and development locally, nationally and internationally. The Creative Exchange has been developed in response to a paradigm shift in content creation and modes of distribution in a digitally connected world, which has profound impact for the arts and humanities. This transformational-change is taking place within the landscape of a growing digital public space that includes archives, data, information and content. How we navigate and experience this space - and how we generate content for and within it - is central to how we create economic, social, cultural and personal value. The Hub draws on new and agile approaches to knowledge exchange for the creative economy that have been previously developed by the partner universities and new ones co-developed with specialist arts organizations, sector organizations and communities of users.

Co-curate North East is a trans-disciplinary project that will open up 'official' museum and 'un-official' co-created community-based collections and archives through innovative collaborative approaches using social media and open archives/data. The project delivers a transformative educational environment creating a rich mix of openly licenced and other data from arts and humanities, science, and medical health contexts, placing 'authoritative museums' data from professional curators alongside data from more informal contexts compiled and published in collaboration with communities. The project draws on a wide range of expertise from Newcastle University and various external partners. University contributions come from the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies, with its heritage and museums academic-practitioners, the Digital Institute, whose computer scientists contribute to an important project on Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy, Medical Education, which has been at the forefront of e-learning, and Education and Communication, which has been piloting a 'Skype Seniors' project connecting motivated, skilled adults with school students. External partners include Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (the leading museums, gallery and archive service in the North East), Woodhorn (which manages four Northumberland museums and the Northumberland Archives), Taylor & Francis Group (a major publishing group), Wellcome Images (a national database of medical sciences images) and Schools Northeast (representing schools in the north east region). The partnership has a range of expertise on community engagement: both Newcastle University, through its recent Beacon North East and its Education School, and the two museum consortia have successfully developed models. Newcastle University has identified three major Societal Challenge Themes: Ageing, Sustainability and Social Renewal. Co-curate North East plays into all three. It seeks to engage and empower communities, especially those involving ethnic minorities and other 'hard to reach' groups - something central to the concept of Social Renewal - for which key partners Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums (TWAM) and Woodhorn have nationally recognised track records. The Ageing theme involves a set of intergenerational priorities highly relevant to Co-curate North East, while it is important that the legacy of key assets generated by the project, particularly the range of digital datasets and learning packages, is sustainable. This will be ensured through their stewardship by TWAM and Woodhorn, who will make them available for future generations of researchers through their regular collections management policies. The project will work with around 20 different community and school groups, many of them based in the Newcastle region but some from rural settings. They will have access to a broad range of digital collections and archives, from the exotic ethnographic objects in the Great North Museum to the scientific and industrial heritage in Discovery Museum and Woodhorn and the wealth of images from publishers Taylor & Francis. Participants will be free to curate their own collections: some may wish to focus on local history, perhaps engaging with the centenary of World War 1 or maybe comparing how objects nowadays gain cultural value from a particular social context with a similar process in the 18th century. This approach meets an identified need for Enquiry Based and Project Based Learning within a consortium of local North East schools already working with the University. The project will help develop curriculum innovation and an exciting offer to community groups (from Young Archaeologists to U3A). Evaluation will be through a case-study methodology based on Theory of Change, which involves working closely with participant organisations to help them articulate their ideas and expose contradictions between theories and practice.