The ACCORD project seeks to examine the opportunities and implications of digital visualisation technologies for community engagement and research through the co-creation of three-dimensional (3D) models of historic monuments and places. Despite their increasing accessibility, techniques such as laser scanning, 3D modelling and 3D printing have remained firmly in the domain of heritage specialists. Expert forms of knowledge and/or professional priorities frame the use of digital visualisation technologies, and forms of community-based social value are rarely addressed. Consequently, the resulting digital objects fail to engage communities as a means of researching and representing their heritage, despite the now widespread recognition of the importance of community engagement and social value in the heritage sector. The ACCORD project aims to address this gap through the co-design and co-production of an integrated research asset that addresses social value and engages communities with transformative digital technologies. ACCORD will create a permanently archived open-access dataset of community co-produced 3D digital models of archaeological sites and monuments, integrated with expressions of social value and contextual documentation. The project will actively engage community groups that have ongoing relationships to heritage places in the process of creating 3D records and models of those places. With the support of visualisation technologists, community engagement practitioners, and experts in social value, each community group will design, direct and produce their own 3D objects. The use of digital technologies to enhance and generate forms of social significance will be an important outcome, adding distinctive value to existing heritage assets and our understandings of them. Community groups will be able to draw on the resulting digital datasets for various purposes, such as public presentation, education, and tourism initiatives. The records and models resulting from the project will also provide important research resources for community groups, heritage managers and academic researchers. Evaluation will be an integral aspect of ACCORD project, examining the relationships between community groups, digital heritage professionals and the outputs they have created. This will include a review of the transformative aspects of the process, investigating changes in attitudes to 3D recording technologies during the life of the project, as well as the forms of significance, authenticity and value acquired by the resulting 3D objects. Ultimately, through the co-production of an open-access dataset, and the creation of a 'community of communities' engaged in sharing skills and experiences, ACCORD seeks to broaden capacity for the creation and reuse of digital visualisation technologies in community heritage activities and research.

Playfulness is an innate human trait crucial for making sense of the world, creativity, development of social skills and positive emotions. It is a trait which is strongly encouraged in children and young people but increasingly is being squeezed out in adulthood amidst the pressures and technologies of contemporary western society. It is often viewed as 'juvenile' and 'unproductive' use of time. Yet playfulness is celebrated in different forms within some arenas - particuarly the creative arts and sport - where the act of play is viewed as offering positive health and well-being benefits, actively encouraged as part of community cohesion agendas and providing spaces for creativity and entrepreneurial thinking. By engaging actively with these the arenas of creative arts & culture and sport, and drawing on the experiences and practices which encourage and celebrate playfulness, the proposed research will seek, firstly to characterise attributes of playfulness and, secondly to identify new research questions concerning ways in which it might be fostered in adults in order to promote flourishing, resilience, creativity and therefore enhance wellbeing for both individuals and communities. It will thus also explore how playfulness can help to reconnect people and communities, assisting to overcome conflict and dissonance but reducing isolation, stress, and alienation.

The central aim of the project is to produce a comprehensive account of the early development of cinema in Scotland. Where were the early films shown; who by and to whom? Where were cinemas built; by whom and with what success? What films did they show and who went to them? How did films circulate, and who distributed them. What kinds of film were (and were not) produced in Scotland? Who produced them? What succeeded and what did not? How did cinema grow as a business? In what ways did cinema, within thirty years, become a major cultural form? What were the differences between rural cinema and cinema as an urban phenomenon? How were the expectations of cinema defined; what social, cultural and aesthetic values were ascribed to it; and how was the experience of cinema described in the press and other sources?\n\nThe popularity of cinema in Scotland - and in Glasgow particularly - is legendary. Purpose-built cinemas began to appear in 1910, and by 1920 there were 557 cinemas in Scotland. By 1929, according to the historian, Christopher Harvie, Glasgow alone had 127 cinemas. Green's Playhouse, opening in 1927 had a seating capacity of 4,368, and was, by repute, the largest cinema in the world outside the USA. In 1939, according to Bruce Peter, there were 'a staggering 114 picture houses in Glasgow with a seating capacity in excess of 175,000, more cinema seats per head than any other city in the world.' \n\nAgainst this background, the absence of indigenously produced feature film is striking. In a period from 1915 to 1930, when the Irish Filmography lists around 30 Irish-produced fiction films, the Scottish record contains 6. In the same period, internationally, over 150 films have clearly identified Scottish themes; e.g. Bonnie Prince Charlie, Rob Roy, and Mary, Queen of Scots. \n\nThis disparity - between the popularity of cinema and the production of feature films; between the international market for Scottish stories and the apparent absence of a domestic industry which might sustain their production - points to a key element in the historical context for the research. \n\nMore broadly, the project addresses a fundamental gap in the historical record of Scottish culture, which is itself a disparity in current research: the disparity between the importance of cinema in 20th-century Scottish culture, the wealth of documentary evidence available in archives, and the lack of sustained academic research in uncovering, collating and making sense of this evidence. While early Irish cinema has been well surveyed in monographs and edited collections, while there are two monographs which address early cinema in Wales, and while the inventiveness of regional producers in Brighton, Sheffield or Blackburn is part of the international history of early cinema, research into history of the early cinema in Scotland is covered by a handful of articles and catalogue introductions.\n\nThis, then, will be the first major attempt to bring together systematically a range of resources and archive records in order to produce a comprehensive account of the beginnings of cinema in Scotland. It will cover production, distribution, exhibition and reception in order to understand the cultural, social and economic place of cinema in the early years of the twentieth century: the phenomenon which Francesco Casetti describes as 'the popularization of modernity and the modernization of popularity.' In this sense, the research will contribute to a more complex understanding of the cultural significance of the so-called 'silent period'. An understanding of the particular popularity of the 'cinema of attractions' in Scotland -- of 'shows', 'local topicals' and 'actualities' -- will add significantly to international research into film history and to the historical understanding of a period when it was not yet certain that cinema would become either a dominant form of culture, or, indeed, a narrative form of entertainment.

There is a proven evidence base for the benefits of both walking and art on physical health and mental wellbeing. Our project addresses the lacuna between the arts and those working to promote walking well in the wider community. Walking organisations need rapidly to find new ways to support their members during social restrictions, and to diversify membership to support more people to walk well in and beyond a pandemic. COVID-19 poses an unprecedented challenge to cultural organisations with the need to rethink practices due to physical distancing. Responses to lockdown have created the opportunity to understand how creative walking activities have been and could be used to mitigate isolation and anxiety, maintain health and wellbeing, enhance social connectivity, and facilitate cultural empowerment. This project will deliver a significant contribution to the understanding of, and response to, the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts, generate new data about a key activity, and innovate arts resources for rapid implementation to support health, wellbeing, resilience and cultural participation. Collaborating with partner organisations, artists, cultural workers, and residents, the project will capture: a) the walking experiences and creative interventions of people during COVID-19 restrictions. b) the 'lockdown' work of artists using walking activity within conditions of restriction. c) the potential of the arts to sustain, encourage and more equitably support walking during and recovering from a pandemic. Key deliverables include: i) a new data set and report on walking experiences and creative approaches to walking well and safely ii) a curated digital gallery of creative walking models, open-access Walking Toolkits and piloted prototypes iii) a Cultural Walking Summit iv) three peer-reviewed articles v) a new cross-sectoral partnership.

As the newspaper poetry columns, workers' periodicals, surviving records of local libraries and reading rooms, and society accounts show, industrial workers spent substantial amounts of their working lives and brief leisure time in writing, reading, and discussing works of literature. Every industrial workplace had its writer in this period. Most had more than one, like poets and journalists 'Nisbet Noble' (James Ferguson) and 'Will Harrow' (John Stanley) at Stanley Mills in Perthshire, or autobiographers and poets 'Rustic Rhymer' (Thomas Stewart) and 'Davie' (David Wingate) in the same Lanarkshire mine. 'Piston, Pen & Press' recovers the forgotten ways in which these industrial workers engaged with literary culture from the 1840s to the First World War. By focusing on miners, railway workers, and textile factory workers it will investigate how profession, location, and the perception of being part of a specific workforce community influenced workers' activities as authors, performers and readers. Our concentration is on Scotland and the North of England, with Britain's two greatest Victorian industrial cities, Manchester and Glasgow, as centres of interest. We will use archival research and scoping studies of newspaper and periodical databases to uncover the poems, songs, periodical and newspaper writings and other prose writings (including autobiography and biography) of workers in these industries. We will additionally work with the preserved records of nineteenth-century libraries and reading rooms to trace a history of reading through borrowers' records, and to study records of 'literary' associations (minute books, members' directories, manuscript magazines) linked to specific workplaces or operating in their vicinity. No previous project or published work has attempted to reflect on working-class literary cultures in the long Victorian period in terms of both profession and location. Further, existing studies and anthologies do not provide our interdisciplinary focus on the history of reading, the history of associational culture, and the literary analysis of workers' writings. Although recent historical work on Britain's industrial revolution has shifted towards a greater consideration of workers' writings, research into literary representations of Victorian industry is still dominated by accounts of observers or employers, not by how workers themselves represented their labour and presented themselves as a cultured workforce with investments in established as well as popular literature. Despite growing interest in working-class reading, much evidence of workers' cultural investments and cultural literacy remains scattered in local and regional archives. What we currently know or hypothesize about what Victorian workers (like those listed above) wrote, read or sung, and how they accessed literary works, is a fraction of what we could know through in-depth archival research and a careful and comparative analysis of findings. While the academic outcomes of this project will contribute significantly to the study of working-class culture, history and literature, and to our scholarly perceptions of Victorian industrialism, we also seek to create public awareness of this neglected aspect of industrial heritage. Building on our existing connections and developing new ones, we will work with selected museums and non-academic partners, both national and local, on ways to include this vital intangible heritage in their collections and outreach activities. In doing so we hope to foster fruitful discussions between institutions and individuals in the heritage sector in Scotland and the North of England about the status and significance of literary cultures in Britain's industrial past. Through our connections to the General Federation of Trades Unions and potentially other unions, 'Piston, Pen & Press' will also incorporate reflection on the 21st century workplace and historical workplace culture.