This project will engage with the contributors to User Generated Content websites in order to understand better how they use such sites to develop their skills and knowledge. UGC sites offer a mix of opportunities to post your own work and receive comment from the community of users as well as post comments on the work of others. In some cases there are also opportunities to communicate with acknowledged experts. There is a lot of interest in this kind of activity, which is seen as a newly emerging cultural practice that has democratised media publishing. However, little research into UGC sites has yet been funded or published, so little is known about the range and depth of engagement. Early indications are that interaction around such content hosting sites might offer opportunities for contributors to learn more about creating media and develop their practical and critical skills. In order to explore this potential the BBC has developed BBC Blast, a UGC web service with a real world tour element. The resulting store of content, posts and established users provides an excellent research site to analyse the extent to which such communities of users do in fact collaborate to learn and develop their creative skills. \n\nIn order to explore the potential of sites such as Blast to support learning communities and inform BBC developments in this area University of Bristol and BBC staff have collaborated to develop the following research questions (which are further developed in the work programme):\n\nAbout users and use:\n\n- Who is posting user generated content (UGC) and what motivates them?\n- Can the dialogues that emerge within Blast actually support learning?\n- Do learning communities grow up around UGC sites like Blast / is there real interaction between users that informs and develops the work of those who post? \n\nAbout BBC Blast:\n- To what extent does the Blast offer, including Blast on Tour, meet its goals of engaging and inspiring creative learners?\n- How might the design (technical and editorial) be modified to maximise this impact?\n\nThis project would therefore seek to accomplish the following goals:\n\nAn analysis of existing interactions for evidence of learning dialogues. \nA review of the range of models of such dialogues that occur elsewhere. \nAn articulation of the ways in which the design and functionality of Blast could be developed to increase the opportunity and range of such learning dialogues.\nHistories of particular user development, tracking the journey from newbie to expert\nAn overview of the patterns of engagement with UGC sites to understand the motivations of those who post, those who see posting as an opportunity to learn and those who chose not to post. \n\nThroughout the project will be exploring a variety of ways to engage the creative, technical and editorial staff at the BBC in a dialogue about the research and its implications. We intend to use a blend of face to face and virtual strategies to maximise the range of opportuinties for knowledge exchange.\n\n

The aim of this project is to utilise the video digitisation suites that the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA) acquired in our previous Capability for Collections grant (AH/V011952/1) to actively engage new and, particularly, youth audiences in collections-based research and digital engagement. These activities will make use of and preserve valuable, under-studied and at-risk parts of our collections that are of local, national and international significance. We will achieve the engagement strategies through partnership with the BBC who will collaborate on the selection of content and the digital outputs, and make use of the generated digital content for their 'BBC at 100' celebrations (2022). EAFA's extensive collections of film, video and born-digital content, covering the 1890s to the present, are a valuable resource for academics and educators working across a range of disciplines. EAFA is a thriving research centre, collaborating on a range of funded research projects and educational initiatives. These projects reflect the strengths of our collections in amateur filmmaking and regional television (BBC East / ITV-Anglia), but also EAFA's cutting-edge digital expertise and infrastructure. In 2020, EAFA was successful in securing funding for seven video digitisation kits from Capability for Collections. This consisted of: - 7 x FSI DM240 (professional 'reference' video monitor with waveform displays, legal levels and vectorscopes) - 7 x HP EliteDesk PC's The new equipment, in combination with Leitch Timebase Correctors, Vrecord (open source video digitisation software) and Blackmagic video capture cards make up seven video digitisation workstations that can digitise a wide range of formats and are able to be operated by student volunteers (following a short training programme). The BBC collection includes a number of 'at-risk' video formats as well as film titles. EAFA's proposal is that the archive will digitise a range of BBC videos and films alongside selections from other valuable EAFA collections to meet the objectives of the research and engagement strategies. This grant will fund digitisation of approximately 550+ hours of video and film content. Some of this will be undertaken by the technical team in EAFA but we will also train a small group of UEA students to: digitise BBC and other EAFA tapes; to catalogue the material; to assist in selecting material for EAFA's annual Mash up filmmaking competition; and curating a selection of BBC content online and programmed at a live event. The material will also be viewed and interacted with by the public as part of the BBC's 100th Anniversary, within their flagship 'Story of Us' online platform. The qualitative and quantitative research undertaken at the end of the project with the archive volunteers and Mash Up competition entrants will be used to produce an open-access report aimed at key stakeholder organisations we consulted (BBC, BFI, National Lottery Heritage Fund, INTO Film) and the wider heritage / screen education sectors. This will address their desires to understand the values and impacts of digitisation training, online curation and creative reuse projects for engaging youth audiences and developing their future skills.

The cost of producing dynamically-updated media content - such as online video news packages - across multiple languages is very high. Maintaining substantial teams of journalists per language is expensive and inflexible. Modern media organisations like the BBC or the Financial Times need a more agile approach: they must be able to react quickly to changing world events (e.g., breaking news or emerging markets), dynamically allocating their limited resources in response to external demands. Ideally, they would like to create `pop-up' services & products in previously-unsupported languages, then to scale them up or down later. The government has set the BBC a target of reaching a global audience of 500 million people by 2022, compared with today's 308 million. The only way to reach such a huge audience is through new language services and efficient production techniques. Text-to-speech - which automatically produces speech from text - offers an attractive solution to this challenge, and the BBC have identified computer assisted translation and text-to-speech as key technologies that will provide them with new ways of creating and reversioning their content across many languages. This project's objectives are to push text-to-speech technology towards "broadcast quality" computer-generated speech (i.e., good enough for the BBC to broadcast) in many languages, and to make it cheap and easy to add more languages later. We will do this by combining and extending several distinct pieces of our previous basic research on text-to-speech. We will use the latest data-driven machine learning techniques, and extend them to produce much higher quality output speech. At the same time, we will enable the possibility of human control over the speech. This will allow the user (e.g., a BBC journalist) to adjust the speech to make sure the quality and the speaking style is right for their purposes (e.g., correcting the pronunciation of a difficult word, or putting emphasis in the right place). The technology we will create for the likes of the BBC will also enable smaller companies and other organisations, state bodies, charities, and individuals to rapidly create high-quality spoken content, in whatever language or domain they are operating. We will work with other types of organisation during the project, to make sure that the technology we create has broad appeal and will be useful to a wide range of companies and individuals.

This project aims to establish how children inhabit and engage with immersive digital environments, based on a case study of CBBC World, in close collaboration with BBC Children's department. Launched in April 2007, CBBC World is a 3D virtual environment offering exploration and creative opportunities for children to experiment with music, drawing and animation, alongside a dedicated website and message board community. \n\nVirtual worlds for children have also been produced by Nickelodeon and Playstation 3, building on the success of Second Life, a 3D virtual world aimed more at adults. As a virtual world produced by a public service broadcaster, however, CBBC World faces unique challenges.\n\nThe researchers will work with BBC producers as well as child users, and in particular take an interest in the blurring of the division between 'producer' and 'user' by studying ways in which children create content for the world, and could play a role in its management. Beyond this, BBC Children's and the researchers hope that the study will suggest how children might be involved with the organisation itself, in the future, as active citizens able to engage with digital life in creative and responsible ways.\n\nFurthermore, this is a comparative study, considering how children create imaginative worlds and make social connections in the real world, with how children behave socially and creatively in virtual spaces. This grounding in real life behaviour - for example, how children create 'dens' and organise their bedrooms or private space - will anchor the study firmly around the children, and how the BBC is responding to their preferences and needs. \n\nThe fieldwork will involve 75 participants aged 7-11 years, in five mixed socio-economic and ethnic groups located in Scotland, Wales, N Ireland, and England. Each group will participate in two workshops, two months apart. The first workshop will invite children to articulate, through playful and creative activities, how they organise their bedrooms, dens and imaginary spaces. At the end of the first session the children will be introduced to CBBC World, invited to participate in the World over the following weeks (using the computers in their homes), and keep creative diaries about their engagement with the World, and with CBBC (and other related media) in general. Parents will also complete a questionnaire regarding their feelings about their children participating in this virtual world.\n\nThe second workshop, with the same children, will concentrate on CBBC World. Computers will be available for the children to show each other activities, but the workshop will encourage children to articulate their thoughts about CBBC World by other means, such as performance and artwork. Such visual artefacts, and performance, will be interpreted using the approach developed in full in Gauntlett (2007), in which the children themselves will be asked to produce the interpretation (rather than the researcher producing a speculative 'reading' after the event).\n\nIn addition, the researcher will also spend time as a participant observer working alongside the producers and hosts of BBC Children's (taking a minor role). A detailed research diary will be used to note congruencies and disparities between producers' expectations and children's own responses. \n\nThe findings will be disseminated in a range of forms. In addition to academic publications including journal articles and book chapters, the researchers will produce reports, video clips, a blog, a booklet and production workshops for BBC producers, and graphical mapping and visualisations of children's engagement with CBBC World. Finally there will be a conference hosted by University of Westminster, and a tour of BBC production centres to report and discuss the findings.\n

This project, developed in partnership with the BBC, aims to co-produce with audiences a special podcast for the centenary that illuminates the cultural impact of Call the Midwife, one of the BBC's most watched and celebrated dramas which explores Britain's medical and social history. Over fifteen episodes, the podcast will feature thirty audience stories sparked by the show's re-telling of post-war community life and excavation of human experience from the cradle to the grave. Each episode will feature two viewers in conversation who reflect on and share personal experiences of a particular storyline from the show, such as the legalisation of abortion, decriminalisation of homosexuality, or Thalidomide scandal. This might be two childhood friends who lived through and reminisce about a particular 'moment' in history, midwives who witnessed firsthand the introduction of the contraceptive pill, a father and daughter moved by the show's dramatisation of adoption, a grandmother and grandson who discuss their past and present roles in the NHS, or a brother and sister who recall their great aunt's arrival in Britain as part of the Windrush generation. By asking audiences 'what does Call the Midwife mean to you?', the podcast will produce new and diverse storytelling, and elicit untold local stories and intergenerational conversations inspired by watching the drama. The show's subject matter is not, however, confined to the past meaning the podcast will engage in contemporary debates around healthcare, the welfare state, and the NHS. Speaking with audiences will also reveal the show's 'place' in people's lives - a focal point for the millions of families who gather to watch the Christmas special - thereby tapping into the BBC's contribution to British broadcasting and impact on media engagement. Mirroring Call the Midwife's dockland setting, viewers will be recruited from three port cities: Liverpool, Newcastle, and Bristol. This project offers an exciting opportunity to create an audio compendium to the much-loved show and capture in sound how and why the drama resonates so strongly with audiences. The inspiration for this project lies in the special connection between Call the Midwife and its audiences, which is captured neatly by series writer, Heidi Thomas (2018): "I am constantly touched and humbled by people bothering to email or write about their experiences, and it does make me think with great care about storylines that we do that might be challenging, particularly storylines around disability or immigration, because I think newcomers to this country aren't always made as welcome as they might be and disabled people don't always get the support that they might receive or that they deserve. And so I think when people write to me saying, 'Yes, your stories or your episode of last week has shone a light on my experience', I just feel really humbled by it and I'm really pleased that we stick our necks out the way we do with our storytelling". The podcast seeks to tap into this audience interest, illuminate the connections and disjunctures between life in the 1950s and 60s, and the present day, and amplify the voices of viewers who remember and have lived through its storylines. The podcast will therefore create an oral history of viewers' stories and experiences in celebration of the show's enduring popularity for the BBC's centenary. The project will make a valuable contribution to the 'creative turn' in cultural geography, which is revealing new objects of study and innovative ways of researching them. This shift towards creative practices is witnessing geographers turn creators and collaborators, increasingly immersed in doing, rather than simply analysing, cultural geographies. Despite growing interest in sonic geographies, visual and textual media and methods continue to overshadow the aural. By co-producing a podcast, this project will foreground audio and methods of listening within the latest 'creative turn'.