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Five historic Blackfoot First Nations hide shirts held in the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) since 1893 were lent to two museums in Alberta, Canada, to promote cross-cultural exchange of knowledge. Under historic assimilation policies (1885-1970), most heritage objects had been removed from Blackfoot communities to museums, contributing to the destabilization of Blackfoot cultural identity and poor mental and physical health typical of indigenous populations. For the first time in a century over 500 Blackfoot people were able to handle objects made before the assimilation era. This provoked the sharing of cultural knowledge within the Blackfoot community, led to improved self-esteem, and intensified interest and pride in cultural identity. In exchange, Blackfoot people shared cultural knowledge about the shirts with museum professionals from all UK museums with significant Blackfoot collections, trained them in new approaches to museology, and co-curated exhibitions sharing Blackfoot perspectives in Alberta and Oxford reaching over 50,000 people.
Research led by Paul Basu at UCL has explored cultural heritage in post-conflict development in Sierra Leone. The 2009-12 Reanimating Cultural Heritage project (RCH) has engaged in a sustained programme of outreach, advocacy, and capacity building in Sierra Leone's cultural and educational sectors. With partners in the UK and Sierra Leone, it has developed an innovative digital resource connecting diasporas of museum objects, images and sounds with diasporas of people, and provides new access to collections. RCH has contributed to the reanimation of Sierra Leone's National Museum and has mobilised cultural heritage as a wider social resource.
Research at Sussex has enabled the development of interactive virtual museums, which include the Church of Santa Chiara in the Victoria and Albert Museum`s Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, and Sierra Leone digital collections both online and also recently exhibited at the British Museum. These developments apply Internet, XML, 3D visualisation and database technologies in novel ways. Impacts of the research are social and cultural, through support for social cohesion and the public`s greater awareness and understanding of their cultural heritage; impacts are also in the area of public services, by enabling 2017memory institutions` to improve their service delivery by increasing the global reach of their exhibits and the depth of their engagement with visitors.
The `Northern Spirit` research project entailed the co-production of a new gallery about the visual culture, histories and identities of North-East England at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, the region's foremost public historical art gallery. The project generated a range of impacts across the local and national cultural, social and policy spheres:
Professor Paul Heritage joined QMUL in 1996. His research over the last two decades has opened up new understandings of Brazil's transformative arts practices within the UK cultural sector. Through practice-based projects, his research continues to deepen and extend the understanding of innovative Brazilian arts practices in Britain. Heritage has forged new opportunities for UK arts practitioners to develop their work in Brazil and shaped new policy exchanges between ministerial/governmental and non-governmental organisations. His research engages with a diverse range of artists and cultural institutions, reaching over 50,000 people in the period since 2008 via performances/screenings/seminars/exhibitions/events. Through disseminating research into Brazilian culture policy and practices that have responded to extreme social crises, he has strengthened the British cultural sector's confidence in using art in the advancement of social development.
DU researchers have delivered their innovative model of participatory action research (PAR) with Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums Service (TWAM, a major regional museum service in the North east, comprising seven museums and galleries) to further social inclusion and deepen participation from socially marginalised groups. Research findings have led to: (1) enhanced income generation for TWAM, with bids citing DU research bringing in more than £0.5m at a time of shrinking resource for the museum sector; (2) the development of a major new museum gallery, which opened in July 2013; and (3) changes to professional practice consequent upon intensifying the practice of participatory working within TWAM.
Research in UCL Information Studies enables innovative forms of cultural interaction which encourages a deeper, more personal experience for the public. Our crowd-sourcing transcription project, Transcribe Bentham, has enabled a worldwide audience to participate in the transcription of previously unstudied manuscripts. Our QRator project has empowered museum visitors to think of exhibits as social objects, discussing them with other visitors and curators in three important museums via social media. Both have been recognised and imitated as ground-breaking methods of creating partnerships between the public, the academy and cultural heritage institutions.
Copper Kingdom has established the creative reinterpretation, through contemporary art practice, of the abandoned Parys Mountain Copper Mine, in partnership with the communities of North Wales and a range of public and private sector organisations, demonstrating the following impact:
Alliance researchers have devised and applied technologies that bridge the gap between the real and virtual worlds, linking digital data to physical entities. The ability to embed personal stories in objects and places has impacted on the way National Museums Scotland sources and displays collections, while Oxfam has used the research to bring added value to donated goods, leading to an increase in store sales of 53% over a week-long period. Mobile Visual Search technology has been taken-up by global brands and advertising agencies, including Nike, Disney, Vodafone, Nokia, Tesco, P&G, King & Partners, Mocom and Ogilvy, leading one industry expert to describe it as "the new model of marketing mobility". The work has led to a patent, the receipt of several awards, and influenced the formation of a spin-off company, Mobile Acuity (with revenue of over £0.5M to date), which has secured a major investment of over £1M, including from international corporation, [text removed for publication], to invest in the US and East Asia.
The Peoples-based Conservation Project (PBC) has challenged conventional heritage conservation practice by privileging a community's cultural systems over universalised concepts of heritage, through participatory practice. This transformed conservation practice by transferring the focus from material preservation to developing and preserving the connections between people, their cultural heritage, and each other. This new approach has developed a shared responsibility between the National Trust and Maori in the UK and New Zealand for the care of Hinemihi, an historic Maori meeting house which is no longer conserved as an object of built heritage, but as the living focus of a network of reciprocal social relationships.