This follow on funding project, developed in collaboration with the Theatre Royal and Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature, represents an important opportunity to work with partners across the city of Nottingham to establish frameworks both for enabling participation in cultural and heritage activities at a local level and for understanding the value of such participation in terms of the experience of the organisation and the individual. The project uses the small Heritage Lottery Funded project - 'Our Theatre Royal Nottingham: Its Stories, People & Heritage', led by the Theatre Royal in collaboration with the University of Nottingham and commencing in February 2017 - as a case study to develop, test and evaluate the innovative, transferable model, 'Citizen Scholarship'. The Heritage Lottery Fund project itself developed out of the AHRC funded research project 'Mapping Performance Culture: Nottingham 1857-1867' (2006-09) which led to a key collaboration between the University of Nottingham and the Theatre Royal. Building from the experience of the Theatre Royal HLF project, we will work with pilot organisations across Nottingham to develop, test and evaluate an innovative, transferable model of 'Citizen Scholarship' for development and support of archives and histories, enabling communities of volunteers to participate in collection, curation and annotation of archive material and oral histories while developing basic research skills through supported training and activity. The value of volunteer engagement with this activity in terms of wellbeing and cultural enrichment will be evaluated through observing volunteer archive sessions, conducting focus groups and interviewing volunteers and other users of the Theatre and archive. Through the provision of this case study and structured activities to share knowledge and learning from this evaluation with a wide range of smaller cultural and heritage organisations in Nottingham, the project will enable an important shared learning opportunity and support those organisations in designing future engagement and evaluation activities with their audiences. As an outcome of this research, a set of best practice guidelines and a 'toolbox' for Citizen Scholarship participation and engagement, including a publically accessible digital platform for co-curation of archives and histories and frameworks for the evaluation of user engagement through this methodology will be developed. These will be trialled and tested with organisations in Nottingham; the final version will be shared within the UK and Europe through the Heritage Lottery Fund (via the Theatre Royal project) and and more widely through the UNESCO Creative City Network.

The VisitorBox project will produce a toolkit that combines physical ideation cards with a mobile app and web-based idea repository to enable heritage organisations to rapidly generate and share ideas for new visitor experiences. This Follow-on Fund project addresses the 'Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities' theme and will forge impact through commercialization and knowledge exchange. It builds on research undertaken by the project team as well as research and impact collaborations with our external partners. These partners are chosen from different segments of the regional and national heritage economy; they represent curators and collection managers with differing training backgrounds, all keen to harness digital technologies to enhance access to and engagement with their collection assets. VisitorBox presents an unanticipated pathway to impact that has emerged from the AHRC international network Data - Asset - Method (DAM network: AH/J006963/1). This network identified the barriers that prevent our stakeholders operating in the culture economy from accessing digital technologies. The main barrier is the stakeholders' lack of an overview of available technologies, and their low confidence and expertise to experiment with such technologies, especially at the early stages of design and prototyping. The network findings align in particular with our experience of collaborating with partners in the heritage sector, including in the context of three EU-funded projects. We want to bring to bear our knowledge and the expertise gained through the network to overcome the barriers of harnessing digital technologies in this specific sector. Our aim is to respond to one explicit demand of our heritage partners in the domain of visitor engagement, which is their key means of intellectual and commercial exploitation: to have access to their own design and prototyping exploration tools and so scale up the impact of our research and consultancy. Researchers and partners (including the Nottingham Castle and Galleries, the National Videogame Arcade, the D.H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum, Nottingham's UNESCO City of Literature, and the National Trust) will work together as co-producers of VisitorBox. The tool-set will consist of a set of ideation cards. These physical playing cards represent individual design concepts, technologies, user types, and visiting activities; the cards encapsulate comprehensive engagement design and humanities thinking, reflected in the rules for playing them. The cards will allow players (e.g. curators) to produce new ideas quickly but without compromising on methodological depth. Alongside the card deck VisitorBox will include a mobile app, allowing players to scan individual cards or card combinations to capture ideas and curatorial trajectories in digital form. Players will be able to upload these digital ideas to an interactive website, the VisitorBox repository, and share them with their colleagues, or with trusted partners. Users will also be able to gain access to a rich set of digital resources that will support project refinement and execution. The project will evidence the value of the toolkit through co-production with our partners in six design workshops and additional piloting with twenty national and international heritage organisations. Feedback from these activities will inform the development of a sustainable business model for VisitorBox. We will promote VisitorBox along with our business plan at high-profile sectoral events in Europe and the US, and within the teaching programme of a leading US HE organisation. The project will be led by an early-career researcher - Dr Ben Bedwell - to establish him as a research leader at the interface of Computer Science and the Humanities. The project team has a strong track record of developing challenge-driven technologies for arts and humanities practitioners; it involves the lead investigators of the DAM network, Lorenz and Benford.

The Network 'Writing, Translating, Analysing Dalit Literature' was created in 2014 by Dr Nicole Thiara, Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), UK, and Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak, research centre EMMA at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (UPVM), France, following the award of an AHRC grant. The research conducted during the 2014-16 grant period explored and analysed Dalit literature in international, multi-disciplinary contexts for the first time since Dalit literature, produced by artists formerly labelled 'Untouchables', emerged as the most significant, prolific and controversial literary movement in India in the last 30 years. Despite the quality, vibrancy and experimental nature of this burgeoning literary tradition, it had received scant attention from the general public or in academia. To raise its profile, in Europe and globally, and to stimulate academic research and public interest, Thiara and Misrahi-Barak organised six academic and public-facing events in the UK (at Nottingham Trent University, University of Leicester, University of East Anglia), France (at UPVM) and India (at Savitribai Phule Pune University and Delhi University). They were a resounding success (450 participants in total) and the network produced a website, a digital communications channel and several publications. Follow-on funding will allow a series of festival events to be organised that focus on Dalit and Adivasi literatures and the performing arts in India, France and the UK. During the period of network funding, it became apparent that further collaboration is needed to ensure that work by socially precarious, economically challenged, and culturally marginalized artists becomes visible and is valued in both national and global contexts. It emerged that drama and poetry were among the most marginalised of genres, and received the least attention from scholars, even though these genres are among the most significant in Dalit and Adivasi activist circles and the most prominent in voicing resistance to continued caste discrimination and social exclusion. Even more significant was the insight we gained into the widespread perception amongst Dalit and Adivasi writers and performing artists that their literary and artistic output requires larger and more varied audiences in order to sustain its creative and experimental development. Dalit and Adivasi folk art forms are in danger of disappearing if they do not receive more support from a pan-Indian Dalit and Adivasi audience, and from cultural and state organisations, and can be both supported and enriched by new 'mainstream' audiences and international recognition.