Outside the Box: Open-Air Performance as a Pandemic Response

Case Study Theatre and performance artists innovated in their open-air practices during the pandemic, addressing the impacts upon the cultural sector and social isolation caused by lockdowns, alongside the ongoing protracted crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Spanning theatre and management studies, Outside the Box: Open Air Performance as a Pandemic Response worked with […]

COVID-19 CARE: Culture and the Arts, from Restriction to Enhancement: Protecting Mental Health in the Liverpool City Region

Case Study What was the cost to public mental health of restricted access to arts and culture during the Covid-19 pandemic? How successful were alternative (online or digital) modes of arts and cultural provision in reaching and communicating with established or new audiences? This interdisciplinary study collaborated with 15 arts and cultural organisations and 3 […]

Impacts of COVID-19 on the cultural sector and implications for policy

About the project This project aimed to deepen understanding of the impacts of COVID-19 on cultural organisations, on the cultural sector workforce, and on audiences. There were three strands to this mixed methods research programme. The first examined the impacts on the cultural sector, analysing large data-sets including the ONS Labour Force Survey. These were […]

Visitor Interaction and Machine Curation in the Virtual Liverpool Biennial: A Towards a National Collection Covid-19 Project

About the project This project started from the observation that most machine learning and artifical intelligence systems are deployed in a GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) context as etiher search engines or as ways to automate cataloguing. The research team proposed to use machine learning in a more interactive setting. The project led to […]

Categories
Blog

News from the Culture Box

Dr Chloe Asker (Post Doctoral Research Associate) reflects on methodologies in arts and health research that have become so important during the pandemic and shares some updates on the Culture Box project. Introducing the Culture Box project In recent years, there has been a growing interest in person-centred approaches to engage people with dementia in […]

Comics in the time of COVID-19: Tracking data on web-based comics and evaluating their potential for communicating public health messages

About the project Our pandemic lives are deeply entwined with visual, web-based public health messages, from instructional hand-washing pictograms to infographics about R numbers. Alongside these official public health communications, people have created thousands of web-based comics conveying public health messages. In 2021 this Bournemouth University-based research team collected a sample of over 15,000 ‘COVID […]

Museums, Crisis and Covid-19: Vitality and Vulnerabilities

About the project This research focused on how museums can contribute to community resilience and wellbeing in a time of crisis. Covid-19 has significantly impacted on the museum sector, across the UK and globally. Interviews with staff and stakeholders across Northern Ireland conducted for the study exposed the vulnerability of museums, their staff, projects, and […]

Digital, Regeneration and Experience Economy Modelling (DREEm)

About the project This study explored practical and innovative strategies undertaken by organisations during COVID-19 that sought to develop meaningful digital experiences and content linked to places. Using mixed methods, it collected and analysed data in three case study locations in order to measure the scale and characteristics of the UK experience economy, to understand […]

Cultural and Creative Industries

Arts and Humanities research during the pandemic has shown how the crisis is galvanising practitioners and stakeholders in the cultural sector to find new models for producing work and for reaching audiences. However, it has also exposed structural inequalities and exclusions for audiences and for the sector’s workforce.   Technological innovations, including hybrid modes of digital and […]

Making it FAIR: Understanding the Lockdown ‘Digital Divide’ and the Implications for the Development of UK Digital Infrastructures

About the project This project examined how small museums can address the challenges of engaging with audiences online in lockdown and beyond, in such a way that new digital content generated is sustainable and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Resuable). Researchers conducted an action-based research study with a cohort of 8 small museums; they received training, […]