Working in threes

My encounters with arts organisations leave me thinking that they know all too well that digital technologies are enabling a revolution more profound than the invention of the printing press. Every single smart phone has the same computer power as NASA had at its disposal when it sent the Apollo missions to the moon. Children are growing up staggeringly tech savvy and tens of thousands of silver surfers, like my mum, do their shopping online. Whether they are large or small, many arts and cultural organisations are asking how they can embrace the opportunities that digital technologies afford.

Could digital technologies help them perform in surprising new ways? Say, build an igloo on stage and hold a play in it with lighting and music that responds to the movements and sounds made by the audience and performers? Could smart phone games help make a gallery more engaging to young South Asian audiences? Could site-specific art be accessed digitally and could the experience enrich a lonely night in a hotel? Could anyone in the world access RSC prompt books, photos of an associated performance, plus a host of previously hidden archive material? Could tech encourage people to join real-world reading groups or just have their own, personal reading experiences enriched by learning about other peoples'? Could the best way of exploring the history of a rugby club and, therefore, its home town, be to build a website for its loyal fans and give them the tools to tell the story in their own words and images? Could a smart phone tour of a country house garden be offered, or a digital tool that helps arts organisations make decisions? The answer is, of course, yes.

These funds buy time for people to sit down together, build relationships of trust, try out ideas, shelve them and start again

Those are just some of the 19 digital prototypes that have been developed by cross-sector teams taking part in the Collaborative Arts Triple Helix (CATH) project, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council ‎(AHRC), that began in April 2013 and will end this June.

CATH is based at the Digital Humanities Hub at the University of Birmingham, whose cross-disciplinary team runs the project in partnership with the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. The two universities have hosted a series of three workshops, bringing together professionals from three sectors to work in what the EU inelegantly calls ‘triple helix’ collaboration. The first event, hosted by the Hub, had 80 attendees from the cultural sector, SMEs and universities. That was about twice as many people as had been expected, indicating that all involved appreciated that by pooling knowledge and expertise across sectors their chances of making the most of the digital might be maximised.

All the workshops aimed to create an environment in which attendees could operate comfortably beyond their usual comfort zones. Coders and graphic designers chatted with archivists, curators, artists, playwrights, archaeologists, law scholars, theologians and English literature experts. Madcap schemes were cooked up, broken down and rebuilt as the attendees started to form ‘triplets’ – each of which included a cultural organisation, an SME and an academic. In between events the project’s ‘broker’ (another inelegant phrase, this time our own fault), Lara Ratnaraja, worked tirelessly to figure out which ‘pairs’ were missing the part that would make them an ideal ‘triplet’, making helpful introductions. As the triplets coalesced and co-developed themes and concepts, they began to apply to the CATH team for £4,000 to develop their digital prototype. As it turned out, all the academics agreed to waive their fees so that their SME and cultural partners could contribute more time to their project.

Throughout CATH, Johannah Latchem, the project’s research associate, has devised light touch questionnaires, held one-to-one interviews and focus groups with triplets all aimed at revealing what the benefits of and barriers to such collaborative work are. Many of her findings are delightful: academics saying that they get asked questions by their partners that have never been raised within universities and that the experience has transformed their own research; or cultural organisations saying that they had never realised the potential of some new form of technology that an SME had introduced to them at a workshop; SMEs saying they had never imagined using tech X to do wildly creative Y.

It has not all been plain sailing. One triplet had a bit of a tiff, collapsed and then reformed. Most struggled with establishing a common language. Some of the academics took a while to get their heads around how precious time is to SMEs. The non-academics had to come to terms with how slow university invoicing processes can be, although the CATH project has helped transform many of those processes. But, every single triplet member thinks that the project has been a valuable learning experience, leading to tangible outputs and equipping them well for a future in which knowledge and practice are likely to be produced increasingly in collaboration. What is more, of those 19 funded prototypes, by January eight of them had applied for Digital R&D funding‎ and seven of them have got through to the next round. For the Midlands that is an astonishing hit rate.

Although the CATH team has yet to write the final report (or have the final workshop or end of project symposium), it is safe to say that, having access to small pots of development money (say, £4,000) goes an enormously long way. Especially when enabled by a dedicated ‘broker’ (so it is not all dependent on haphazard speed dating events), these funds buy time for people to sit down together, build relationships of trust, try out ideas, shelve them and start again. Hence, the large numbers of shortlisted Digital R&D Funding applications that read like they have a viable plan − because they do have a viable plan. It turns out that the arts sector, the cultural sector and academics mainly drawn from the arts and humanities are not afraid of the digital revolution − they are happy being comfortably uncomfortable together, delighted to challenge and to be challenged. They know that politicians are wrong when they pin the hopes of the nation on science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). Actually, this revolution will be like the last one: it will be STEAM powered (science, technology, engineering, ARTS and maths).

Dr Richard Clay is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art and Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub at the University of Birmingham.
www.birmingham.ac.uk