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Cultural Value 2014 Project Summaries

Research Development Awards

Grant Holder: Dr Daniel Allington

Project Title: Online networks and the production of value in electronic

Summary: Cultural value is one of the areas in which (as the saying goes) perceptions are also realities. Thus, sociologists have argued that the production of cultural value is actually the production of a form of belief. Although popular accounts of how culture gets made tend to focus on brilliant individual creators, research has highlighted over and over again that their work typically emerges from a creative milieu, in which value (or belief in value) comes into existence. This arguably explains why cultural producers - musicians, artists, etc - are among the most committed audiences for cultural products, and why so many of them create work primarily for appreciation by other producers. This highlights the relationship between amateur, professional, and semi-professional cultural production, which is commonly assumed to have been transformed by Web 2.0 technologies that potentially making every internet user into a creator and publisher of digital content. This project will make an incisive contribution to our understanding of how culture and its value is produced in the digital age by focusing on a specific art form: music. will gather evidence from the SoundCloud website, which many musicians use for commenting on one another's work. And we will focus on a specific genre that has a special relationship with that website, i.e. . We will identify as 'electronic music' all audio files that are identified by their creators with synonyms of or recognised genres of electronic music (to take just a few examples: , intelligent music, electronica, algorave, , electronic pop, live coding). Although many registered users of SoundCloud do not produce audio content, the website's original core users consisted of musicians - especially electronic musicians - who use it for commenting on one another's work. This project will study relationships between millions of users of that website, building a series of social network graphs to represent their evaluations of audio files uploaded by other users. Social network analysis provides mathematical ways of analysing peer esteem and reflecting the intuition that the opinion of a highly-regarded creator may have special impact: for example, in a social network diagram representing positive evaluations, more highly esteemed producers will occupy more central positions, with the most central positions being occupied by those who are esteemed by other highly esteemed producers. In order to enhance this analysis, we will not only study evaluations implied by 'likes' and 'follows' on the website, but also use computational linguistic analysis to study the kinds of language used in comments and identify whether a given comment is likely to be positive or negative. Moreover, we will observe and interview musicians in the real world in order to understand how they locate value in their relationships with one another, both online and off. Findings will be disseminated through a range of venues, including a public access event featuring lectures from academics who have carried related studies and invited performances by musicians who have been studied. We will also write a public report explaining our findings to a general audience (including emerging musicians who may wish to understand the role that websites such as SoundCloud can play in building a career), and we will release the source code to all the applications we create, with full instructions that will enable other researchers (both inside and outside the university system) to adapt those applications to study data from other sources. Our

website will include a blog providing progress updates, and knowledge will be further disseminated through professionally-produced audiovisual podcasts and press releases to specialist media.

Grant Holder: Dr Matthew Thomas Brennan

Project Title: From pub to stadium: The ecology of public and commercial investment in British live music venues

Summary: Live music is a prime illustration of wider issues in the UK's cultural sector. Pressure on the public purse, nationally and locally, is felt from larger institutions - orchestras, opera companies, etc.- to the grassroots as direct funding dries up due to cuts. Meanwhile, live music has overtaken recorded sector revenues since 2008. Major events sell-out in hours and, as lobbying group UK Music's recent report on music tourism shows, the live sector is a significant source of income for the nation. Yet the benefits are felt unevenly, and not simply as a matter of suffering state subsidised arts and a healthy commercial sector. Growing concern for the fate of venues at the lower level of the economic activity is reflected in media and industry reports of struggles and closure. Neither is this just recession based. The key piece of music related legislation in recent times - the Live Music Act 2012 - deregulated the provision of live music of all kinds in licensed premises. But it was the result of a long campaign by industry, grassroots and legislators that arose from the negative impact of earlier licensing legislation in 2003 on venues and practitioners. Calls for more deregulation also involve both industry (UK Music) and musicians' (the Musicians' Union) representatives. Neither are music venues alone in their predicament. Questions of how to support culture hinge on assessments of how to value it - for economic benefit or innate social worth - and intersect with those about the role of the state and private vs public investment. Opposing speeches by UK Culture Secretary Maria Miller and Scottish Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop have starkly illustrated the lines between economic and intrinsic values as cases for investment. Implicit in wider debates and those around live music is a sense that different points on the scale of activity are interdependent. Today's stadium acts started in the pubs and local hotspots that are now struggling - in other words, an ecological model. Again, private and public sector inputs are not discrete but interdependent. Transport infrastructure, sensitive or draconian local licensing regimes, zoning and health and safety policies all affect local live music ecologies just as do direct investment from state, municipality or commerce. We will shed light on such interactions - the funding ecology - by examining them in context and practice in three case-study localities across the UK - the London Borough of Camden, Leeds and Glasgow. We will work with three key sector groups: PRS for Music, who license venues' use of copyright compositions, will provide data allowing us to map the size and types of venue in each area. With UK Music and the Musicians' Union (MU), we will then select case studies of venue capacities in six categories: Small (Under 200 capacity); Small-Medium (200- 500); Medium (500-2,000); Medium-Large (2,000-5,000); Large (5,000-20,000); Very Large (20,000+). Interviews with local and national policy makers, council officers, regional MU representatives, and venue operators will, along with the mapping exercise, show how the interplay of regulation, finance, ownership and management structures produce and reflect conceptions of cultural value in theory and in practice across the live ecology. The ecological model of music venues in the context of investment and stakeholder activity will both broaden and sharpen our understanding of the sector. It will account for the narratives of public and private actors in shaping the environment in which musical careers proceed as an interdependent system of different levels of economic activity. The effects of local and national regulation, alongside various forms of direct subsidy and indirect support (or hindrance), are felt in ways both obvious and

hidden. We will illuminate this system to provide insights into live music, and cultural activity at large, for policy makers, industry and practitioners alike.

Grant Holder: Professor Eric Clarke

Project Title: Music, empathy and cultural understanding

Summary: In the age of the internet and with the dramatic proliferation of mobile listening technologies, music has unprecedented global distribution and influence on people's lives. It is a source of intense experiences of both the most individual (personal stereos) and massively communal (large-scale live events, and global simulcasts) kind; and it increasingly brings together or exploits an exceptional range of cultures and histories, through developments in '', sampling, mash-up, re-release, archival recording, and hybridisation. The aim of this Research Development project is to pursue the idea that music affords powerful insights into other consciousness’s and cultural identities, and that in doing so it has powerful potential for cultural understanding. The objectives of the project are: 1) to bring together the considerable body of research and scholarship, across disciplines ranging from the neuroscience and psychology of music to the sociology and anthropology of music, and cultural musicology, that has proposed or presented evidence for music's power to promote empathy and social/cultural understanding through powerful affective, cognitive and social factors, and to propose a unifying and synthesising conceptual framework in which to connect and make sense of this disparate evidence, and to use that framework to highlight interdisciplinary points of convergence and divergence; 2) to undertake a novel piece of empirical research to further develop and test one important aspect of those claims; 3) to publish and disseminate the findings of the project, and in doing so to contribute to a developing case for the value of arts and culture to individuals and to society.

Grant Holder: Dr Joshua Edelman

Project Title: The Value of Amateur, Subsidised and Commercial Theatre for Tyneside's Audiences

Summary: This project aims draw a complete and systematic picture of the theatrical life of the city of Newcastle and the surrounding Tyneside region from the perspectives of the audience members who experience it. It will aim to encompass every piece of theatre that takes place in the area during the six-month period of study-professional, amateur and commercial. The project will collect data on who is attending which sort of theatre, what motivates spectators to attend, what experiences they have while there, and in what ways these experiences and values are different for amateur, commercial and subsidized theatre. The project uses a tested combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, and social media analysis to address these questions. While a number of theatre scholars have written about extraordinary performances and audience experiences, it is far more challenging to collect complete data on the more typical examples of theatergoing which, while not traditionally attracting as much scholarly interest, are the daily bread keeping the theatre afloat as an art form and an industry. By including a wide variety of theatrical forms and focusing on audience's experiences, this project will help contribute to a much more nuanced and useful understanding of the role that theatre can play in contemporary British society. The findings will be useful to theatre makers who wish to better serve their audiences, but they will also assist in advocacy for increased financial support for the arts and, in particular, to show how the function of subsided, professional theatre is not one that can be replaced by its amateur or commercial counterparts . The project will work with the Empty Space, a key collaborative hub in Newcastle, and former Arts Council England North East executive director Mark Robinson of the think tank Mission Models Money to ensure that the results of our investigation are made available in an accessible, clear and useful way to the Tyneside theatre community, policymakers and the general public. This project draws its methods from the Project on European Theatre Systems (STEP), a group of theatre sociologists from seven European countries. STEP has developed methods and metrics to collect this data on theatre and audience experience, and has refined and tested them in a number of smaller European cities. Thus far, comprehensive data has been gathered on Groningen, the Netherlands; Aarhus, Denmark; Berne, Switzerland; Maribor, Slovenia; Tartu, Estonia; and Debrecen, Hungary. Both the Principal Investigator and the lead Research Assistant have experience working with STEP and its methods, which are based primarily on the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and Dutch theatre scholar Hans van Maanen. STEP has been devising, testing, and refining its theory and methods since 2005. Common techniques and measures will facilitate comparisons both between different sorts of theatre within Tyneside, and between Tyneside and its continental cousins. Such a comparison will clarify what is distinctive about British theatre culture-not just in terms of its aesthetics, but in terms of the function it serves for its audience and the larger society around it.

Grant Holder: Dr Ian Fillis

Project Title: Measuring the value of the RSA New Contemporaries Exhibition as a Platform for Emerging Artists.

Summary: Our research project is concerned with the economic and cultural value of the visual arts in both market and non-market terms:

- Value to artists (including emerging artists, existing and up-market artists, art college students, artists of future generations)

- Value to consumers as buyers or gallery visitors

- Value to the platform provider, including the gallery, curators, programmers

- Value to the community and other stakeholder groups

Previously, the visual arts have largely been investigated from instrumental rather than intrinsic perspectives and our proposed research will adopt both qualitative and quantitative approaches so that both tangible and intangible dimensions can be acknowledged and understood more clearly. By undertaking a case study, we investigate several dimensions of value created by the RSA New Contemporaries Exhibition as a Platform for Emerging Artists. The RSA mission is to promote and support the creation, understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts through all-year programme of exhibitions and events. The Exhibition has particular importance as a way for newly graduating art students to commence a career in the visual arts. Each individual artist places a certain value on their work. This value can be viewed in both financial and non- financial terms. In addition, the visitors to, and the organisers of the exhibition will also have certain views on the value of the art work being exhibited as well as the exhibition itself. Our research aims to understand how this value is both shaped and understood by those involving parties of the exhibition. This cultural value, as well as economic value, is also of importance to art investors, as well as the RSA in terms of contributing towards its reputation.

With a particular intention to enhance and enrich the existing cultural valuation methods applied by policy makers and economists, we will use a variety of techniques to identify and measure the cultural value associated with the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition. First of all, we apply a non-economic perspective in placing the experience of the individual at the centre of our evaluation. We will examine how emerging artists set their initial benchmarking price, given that there is no historical value of their own work as a reference point and how important this particular exhibition and role of cultural institutions are for them. A series of focus groups will be undertaken to gain insights from value creators and recipients. In-depth interviews will be mostly undertaken with practitioners and professionals. The gatekeepers are representative of a particular social sector, and their valuation approach will add further insights. Secondly, to evaluate how individuals perceive cultural value, we employ a behavioural economics approach, taking account of psychological effects. Based on the propositions of Prospect Theory Kahneman and Tversky, we will apply a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to a Contingent Valuation (CV) approach based on willingness-to-pay model. We will use the survey with gallery visitors and broader stakeholder groups to see whether the stated preference from individuals varies depending on the manner in which the questions are presented. Thirdly, the interpretation of our findings will adopt holistic approaches from

compatibility and interdisciplinary viewpoints including auditors, investors, marketers and psychologists. In addition, we will use a number of accounting measurement methods to ensure that the process of data analysis is rigorous. We envisage that the findings from our research will influence other supporting organisations throughout the to adopt a similar approach to assisting career development. We believe that our findings can help Government and other public bodies to better understand how the arts in general are central to cultural value creation, with creativity and innovation being important drivers of successful practice.

Grant Holder: Professor Matthew Flinders

Project Title: Participatory Arts and Active Citizenship

Summary: If the twentieth century witnessed 'the triumph of democracy' then the twenty-first century appears wedded to 'the failure of democracy' as citizens around the world (setting recent developments in North Africa and the Middle East aside for the moment) appear to have become distrustful of politicians, sceptical about democratic institutions, and disillusioned about the capacity of democratic politics to resolve pressing social concerns. Even the most cursory glance along the spines of the books on the library shelves reveal a set of post-millennium titles that hardly engender confidence that all is well ('Disaffected Democracies', 'Democratic Challenges', 'Democratic Choices', 'Political Disaffection in Contemporary Democracies', 'Hatred of Democracy', 'Why We Hate Politics', 'Democratic Deficit', 'Vanishing Voters', 'Democracy in Retreat', 'Uncontrollable Societies and Disaffected Individuals, etc.). The 'civic culture' so endeared by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba had somehow mutated into a 'critical culture' with parallel pessimism about the future of democracy. It is exactly this context that this project examines the capacity and value of artistic and cultural activities to re- engage disconnected individuals and social groups. Put slightly differently, does culture have a social value in terms of a potential capacity to close the gap between the governors and the governed? Several scholars - and indeed ancient philosophers - have suggested that a positive relationship exists between artistic endeavours and activities and civic values and democratic engagement but as yet no study has attempted to either (1) undertake a meta-analysis of the available research and data, or (2) undertake a specific project that examines individual social values and attitudes before and after an art-based social project, let alone (3) attempted to devise an evidence-based methodology for quantifying the civic value of cultural activity. By working with a range of actors - including the Royal Society of Arts, the House of Commons Outreach Department, 'Art in the Park' and the Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield - and launching an innovative inter-generational arts project this research will produce outputs that address each of these three challenges. This research will not - indeed cannot - come to any broad or sweeping conclusions and its findings will inevitably be contested but it will deliver theoretically informed policy- relevant research that moves the debate about cultural value forward in a positive and evidence-based manner.

Grant Holder: Dr Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt

Project Title: Evaluating the Relationship between Arts and Cultural Engagement and Long-Term Health Outcomes in the UK

Summary: Research teams in the Nordic countries have generated evidence that regular exposure to cultural activities in general, and to film, live music and visual art in particular, increase longevity. In the UK, little analysis has been undertaken of the relationship between cultural participation and long-term health outcomes. The overarching aim of this research is to develop an evidence base for the long-term effects of arts and cultural engagement upon physical and psychological health. In its first phase, this Research Development Project will test the Nordic findings in a UK context, by analysing extant English data pertaining to arts participation and physical and psychological health. In this endeavour, multiple sources will be drawn upon - from the Taking Part survey (co-ordinated by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in partnership with Arts Council England, English Heritage and Sport England) to data gathered via the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale by arts and health organisations in Greater Manchester. A new dataset will be created and made widely available to arts and health researchers working in the UK and beyond, enabling analysis of the relationship between arts participation and physical and psychological health to continue beyond the end of this project. This research programme will then move to consider the validity of the data being collected in this area. The methods that are currently in use, or in the process of being developed, to assess the relationship between arts participation and long-term health benefits have generally been established at some distance from the international arts and health sector. This project will involve both UK- based stakeholders and international experts in a bid to determine how these metrics might be made more appropriate to the sector. Consultation with arts and health professionals in the UK and the Nordic countries will be vital to this process. This project is proposed by the strategic agency, Arts for Health, founded at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1987. Arts for Health maintains significant links with those active in the arts and health field in the Nordic countries, several of whom have expressed their willingness to be consulted. This research programme is expected to generate invaluable evidence about the relationship between arts participation and physical and psychological health. As such, the academic beneficiaries of this project range from those working in the cultural field to those engaging with research in medicine and neuroscience. Of equal importance will be the impact of the project upon non-academic beneficiaries, including policy-makers, professionals working at the interface between the arts and health and the broader population. If it proves possible to substantiate a positive correlation between arts participation and health, this will have considerable ramifications for the arts and health sector in particular and the cultural field in general. The consultation process involving national and international policy-makers and arts and health professionals will give rise to a series of recommendations which, if implemented, will transform the future of cultural provision. The innovative character of this project lies in its willingness to look beyond official statistics and current approaches, in a bid to elucidate measures appropriate to the aesthetic and cognitive character of arts participation. In its entirety, this project seeks to contribute to discussions around methods for evaluating the health outcomes of artistic participation that go beyond those found in the UK Treasury's 'green book'.

Grant Holder: Dr Tracy Harwood

Project Title: Machinima: an investigation into the contribution of participatory user- generated machine-cinema to cultural values

Summary: This project addresses the pertinent issues that have emerged in the massive growth and uptake of machinima, building on previous research into digital creative practice of performance-based media reported in the literature. It will engage key stakeholders from the breadth of creative and cultural industries, as well as the community of machinima practice, through the research design using traditional face-to- face and online techniques including within virtual environments. The range of opinion proposed for inclusion in this project is a key aspect of its contribution to understanding the impact of machinima, which has not previously been investigated. This research will therefore provide an important 'state of the art' dataset and point of reference for future researchers, as well as insight into the immediate and future ways that machinima is impacting on the shifts in our cultural values, particularly towards a visual culture that cannot be addressed through evaluation of social media alone. Machinima is the making of original content using 3D computer games engines and gameplay recorded in real time. Machinima creators ('machinimators') now draw on a multiplicity of computer video games but this type of co-created and participatory content was originally popularised by the growth in fantasy and simulated role-play environments such as World of Warcraft, Halo, Grand Theft Auto and The Sims. It originates from the 'demoscene' whereby computer 'geeks' promote the technical capabilities of computers through demonstrations of gameplay. The first machinima film was released in 1996 and since then machinimators have created and distributed thousands of fan-vids, parodies, satires, reenactments and original content through online fora in an increasingly complex ecology of technologies and new media. Recently, Machinima.com listed on the US stock market based on an impressive record of growth - more than 2.5 billion downloads of user-generated machinima films through its various online channels and 45 million unique monthly users. Content is now included in digital arts festivals and galleries around the world: machinima is inherently a convergence of technology, digital social practice and culture. Importantly, it has been described as 'the visual cultural phenomenon of the 21st century' (Greenaway, 2010). Its growth in popularity has impacted games developers significantly because it challenges the ways in which they view their intellectual property and the role of their customers (games players) in the creation of commercial value, effectively testing the boundaries between authorship and ownership. In turn, this is resulting in shifts in thinking about the format and framing of end-user license agreements. More recently, as a main search facility for online digital creative content, the stability and growth of the community using Machinima.com is considered to be a health indicator of media platforms such as YouTube (much user- generated content posted to this site is machinima and computer gameplay recordings). Despite this impressive growth record, particularly for the UK's digital cultural scene, it remains a relatively under-researched and poorly understood genre of participatory new media (Lowood & Nitsche, 2011). Within media studies, for example, it is described as a convergence culture, produced by 'digital natives' as a form of user-generated content that is superficially consumed in a purely online experience. Within computer gaming studies, it is considered to undermine the demand for animation artists skills, being seen as 'hacking and modding' content. These views fail to recognise the role of emergent creative and computing skillsets, or the ways in which the creative and cultural industries are recognising their value.

Grant Holder: Dr Jacqueline Reynolds

Project Title: The Story of Lidice and Stoke-on-Trent: Towards Deeper Understandings of the Role of Arts and Culture

Summary: This project seeks to improve our understanding of the potential of arts and culture to develop reflection and empathy across geographical divides. It offers a unique case study: that of the relationship between Stoke-on-Trent and Lidice, a tiny village in the Czech Republic that was destroyed by the Nazis on 10 June 1942. In response to this horrific event, local Doctor and Councillor Barnett Stross launched the 'Lidice Shall Live' campaign in September of the same year, rallying the local working people of Stoke-on- Trent to donate to a fund that ultimately contributed to the rebuilding of the village after the war. That ordinary working miners and pottery workers donated in many cases up to a week's wages to this campaign in the middle of the hardship of the Second World War is an astounding testament to the ability of people to demonstrate empathy, compassion and understanding. The village of Lidice today expresses its story through arts and culture: visitors from all over Europe travel there to visit the largest rose garden in Europe, and the museum and art gallery that sit adjacent to the new village. A commemorative event takes place each year on the anniversary of the tragedy, attended by around 5000 visitors and Ambassadors from all over the world. In recent years, the links between Lidice and Stoke-on-Trent have been refreshed with cultural exchanges between the two places, involving a range of arts projects and events that celebrate the cultural ties between the two places. It is striking that in all of the civic engagement and partnership working recently developed between these places, we choose to explore, express and celebrate these ties almost exclusively through arts and culture. Our project addresses the limited understandings that we have of the relationship between arts and culture and empathy, compassion and understanding, despite the fact that evoking such responses is often an implicit objective of arts and cultural activities. Since there is little literature that directly addresses the topic in question, this project seeks to generate new knowledge and understandings by engaging with academics and creative practitioners to explore their understandings of empathy, compassion and understanding; how this impacts on practice, and in what ways this supports and demonstrates the value of arts and cultural activities. The research will focus specifically on story-telling approaches in the contexts of community and participatory arts projects and museums and exhibitions. It will therefore consider both active engagement and the visitor experience. A working group of interdisciplinary academics and creative practitioners will contribute to the development of new approaches and tools that will be utilised when designing and evaluating new arts projects. The findings and tools will be tested by applying them to the chosen case study. It provides a unique opportunity for creative practitioners in both geographical locations to contribute to addressing the research objectives in a variety of ways. As well as analysing existing arts and cultural activities by applying the research findings and outputs, there will also be a funding proposal developed for a new research-informed arts project. This further demonstrates the value of this particular case study, as the relationship between Stoke-on-Trent and Lidice is an on-going one, and there will therefore be opportunities to test, sustain, and further develop the outcomes of this research project in the context of future activities. The findings and outputs of the project will be shared in ways that reach academics, practitioners and the wider public. The project will offer new insights and understandings

of the value of arts and culture in terms of empathy, compassion and understanding, and we anticipate that this will influence policy makers as well as contributing to more informed practice across a very wide geographical area.

Grant Holder: Dr Cornel Sandvoss

Project Title: The Value of Commercial Arts and Culture: A comparative mixed-methods approach to the reception of popular culture

Summary: This project explores the cultural and aesthetic value of commercial culture and arts, focusing on six main areas of contemporary popular culture: film, television, popular music, video gaming, popular literature and comedy. Aesthetic and cultural value are of great importance. In our daily live we constantly make decisions about which forms of culture, art and entertainment we engage with; what texts, works and genres we enjoy, and which ones we value. The vast majority of these are commercial produced. Scholars of many disciplines across arts and humanities, in turn, are tasked to assess the relative worth of different works and objects of art and culture. Yet, methods to evaluate, let alone quantify, cultural value have remained highly controversial, often either focusing solely on process of the production of arts and culture (artists, authors and industries) or conversely only studying uses of popular culture and arts by users alone. There are no objective criteria by which we can determine the aesthetic value of a given object, work or genre - and, as some sociological research has demonstrated, the cultural hierarchies that underpin many of our experiences of popular culture and arts reflect and sometimes legitimise existing hierarchies and inequalities in society. This project therefore seeks to understand aesthetic value not as something that is bound up with a given work of art or text, but that is located in the interaction between culture/art and recipient. Drawing on the notion of 'horizon of experience' the project explores to what extent texts and works in the six different fields of commercial popular culture studied in this project challenge audiences' previous experiences, preferences and expectations and facilities a 'horizontal change' that enriches and broadens previous experiences. This study of intrinsic cultural value in the reception of popular commercial art and culture is supplement by the study of extrinsic social value: the degree to which users, enthusiast and fans experience film, television, popular music, video gaming, popular literature and comedy as pleasurable and enjoyable, becoming an affective part of our identities, and contributing to our wider engagement with culture, arts and society. We do so by employing two different methods from social science research: firstly, based on the analysis of past surveys, we will design and conduct a survey across the main fields of commercial popular culture and arts. This survey will reveal a number of characteristics about the audiences for different fields and genres in commercial arts and culture, including their age, sex and occupation, their values, cultural preferences, consumption patterns, and media usage. Secondly, on the basis of different groups identified in the survey we will select a total of 24 participants, four each from the fields of film, television, popular music, video gaming, popular literature and comedy, for in- depth follow-up interviews in which we explore the history of interviewees' enthusiasm and engagements, and the role that particular fields of popular commercial culture music plays in their everyday life and their sense of identity. Using both methods in parallel will allow us to achieve the following aims: - To identify how and under what circumstances commercial culture and arts enriches and broadens the experiences of users and readers. - To reveal significant variations in the degrees that different fields of commercial culture and arts enrich and broaden the experiences of users and readers. - To explore and document how commercial culture and value become important sources of enjoyment, well-being, belonging and wider participation in cultural life. - To develop and assess research strategies that successfully use a combination of surveying and

interviewing methods which are particularly suited to cultural value in commercial arts and culture.

Grant Holder: Dr David Studdert

Project Title: using Facebook to investigate local history: experience, value and policy implications in one town.

Summary: What is the cultural value of posting to Facebook? This study works with one popular Facebook page, called 'Forgotten Abergavenny', which features photos and memorabilia about the town. The popularity of this page contrasts markedly with the waning popularity of the local newspaper, the use of the library and visits to the museum. It seeks to understand how we might assess the value of posting, the experience of posting and the usefulness of this information to the town, including the local paper, library and museum. It compares the traffic and presentation of this very successful site with the various websites and Facebook pages of the library, the museum and the local newspaper. It interviews a sample group of local and international users of the Facebook site, as well as conducting before and after interviews with the museum, library and newspaper. It analyses the Facebook data using hard data taken from the site. It examines the postings and seeks to understand who posts, when and how they post, what they post and their feelings and experience about posting, using a variety of methods, from audio diaries to phenomenological analyses of the spaces of posting, to questionnaires on value and focus groups. It also engages with the question of the value to be attached to cultural production. To this end it uses methods like contingent valuation and proxy value; methods designed specifically to measure non-monetary value. The need to standardise a methodology in this area of measuring non-monetary is a pressing issue for cultural providers. The results of this research are of direct relevance to all those concerned with the significance of social media and the role of co-production, including academics, local communities and policy makers

Grant Holder: Dr Victoria Walsh

Project Title: Modeling Cultural Value within New Media Cultures of Networked Participation

Summary: This collaborative and interdisciplinary research project between Tate, the Royal College of Art and London South Bank University is based upon the recognition that contemporary professional practice, policy-formation and understandings of cultural value remain resolutely analogue despite the profound changes in how knowledge and contemporary culture is being produced and experienced due to the fundamental changes in human communication that digital technologies and network cultures are creating. Prevailing accounts and concepts of cultural value are essentially based upon representational systems and forms which were originally developed in relationship to analogue technologies. Whilst our social, political and cultural value systems remain tied to representational forms through which society and the individual are constructed and identified, network culture is defined by new non-representational forms of distributed communication and exchange of value in which both the social and the human are being reconstituted. The key problem which this project addresses is that despite the substantial amount of research analysizing the impact of digital technology and the rise of network culture, this research has yet to easily translate into the professional practices of new media nor the policy field of new media and cultural value. The reason for this is rooted in the separation of the practical spheres of theory, practice and policy which itself is historically based upon representational systems of knowledge. This project seeks to develop new understandings of network culture required to develop new modes of knowledge production which are closer to and connected with the new conditions of network culture. The proposed project aims to address the problem of both the limits of representational thinking and the separation of its modes of knowledge production in relationship to analogue and digital cultures by a practice-led enquiry. The project will experiment with dialogic and interdisciplinary modeling of new knowledge by bringing together practitioners, theorists and policy-makers who are inter-connected through existing institutional practices and partnerships. In collaboration with Tate the project adopts an embedded approach to engage with Tate's own networked practices as a means of tracing value in network relations and producing a dialogic response from the network. It will focus upon Tate's digital projects and research initiatives across Tate Media, Tate Learning, Tate Collections and Tate Communications to examine its modes of digital access and co-production. The research will culminate in a three week public research programme that will bring Tate staff engaged with Tate's digital projects and practices into dialogue with co-producers and users along with leading digital culture theoreticians, policy-makers, funders and managers to investigate and record their responses and engagements with a structured series of research questions generated in advance by the project's research analysis of the disjunctures between practice, policy and theory which restrict a new modeling of cultural value in network culture today. All of the public research programme will be recorded and uploaded to the Tate website ensuring public access to the sessions along with the project's report and final research findings.