This Network brings social and health science scholars into dialogue with museum scholars, leaders and policy makers to create a sustainable research agenda focused on the museum attendance and benefit gap. The network will draw in scholars with expertise in inequality, poverty and low educational attainment, experts in culture and health, public health, health and cultural attendance, and scholars of implementation science with expertise in rigorous approaches to intervention development and harnessing research for large-scale change. The Network explores the hypothesis that a deeper understanding within museums and museology of (1) the nature and experience of inequality and (2) how large-scale social and behaviour change is approached in fields such as health, will open up the capacity to understand, theorise, design, implement, evaluate and sustain practices which may address the museum attendance and benefit gap. Data from the official Taking Part Survey, which includes the attendance gap between Upper and Lower Socio-economic Groups in England, show that it has increased from 22.7 percentage points (pp) to 24.7pp over the past 15 years. The same pattern is evident in the rest of the UK. Sociologically, museum visiting reflects the socio-economic gradient, closely tracking inequalities in education, income, employment, mental health and other indicators of social wellbeing. This analysis is supported by decades of research in cultural sociology internationally which, regardless of methodological or theoretical approach, confirms that people who participate in and benefit from state-sponsored cultural forms including museums, are, in the main, from upper socio-economic groups and that the single most important predictor of museum visiting is not class, ethnicity or income but level of prior educational achievement. Population-level studies in the epidemiology of culture, which tell us that simply visiting a museum may have positive health benefits, emphasises the lack of fairness in the current distribution of cultural resources and the way museums reflect and contribute to established inequalities in health and wellbeing. Despite 40 years of concerted efforts by museums of all genres and scales, supported by national and local government policy and targeted investment, including more than £5 billion of Lottery Funding, the strategies used by museums in the UK to reduce inequalities in museum visiting are not working. Whilst pockets of positive transformation have been achieved, museums have failed to find ways to understand, consolidate, share and sustain progress. Focused on measuring small-scale impact and without an evaluation framework linking the activities of individual museums and the ways in which they utilise visitor research with the macro data from surveys like the Taking Part Survey or with the sociological literature on inequality, museums' current uses of research cannot offer insights into the larger question of representative participation. To begin to positively impact deeply entrenched and unequal patterns of attendance and benefit and make credible claims about their contribution to society, museums need to understand the extent to which the attendance and benefit gap is driven by societal factors, which museum interventions are most likely to have an impact, and how they can harness and grow their research capacity to move beyond 'intuitive' approaches to inequality and social change. The new partnerships and synergies the Network will generate are urgent: increasing inequality, the long-term impact of post-2011 austerity, and the dramatic impacts of COVID and new technologies are changing patterns of visiting, often in ways that increase inequalities. As the cultural sector seems likely to face a new round of austerity, having a clearer, more realistic, understanding of how museums might make a greater and more transparent contribution to society will be invaluable.

Summary: This inter-disciplinary project aims at mapping and analysing the emergence, character, and development of the UK independent museums sector from 1960-2020. Between 1970 and 1989, approximately 1300 new museums opened in the UK. The vast majority of these new venues were independent, were founded by community and special interest groups, and individual collectors, and they differed from public-sector museums to such an extent that that they were judged to have 'revolutionized' the sector. There are now some 1600 independent museums in the UK, but despite the extraordinary boom in their numbers we know very little about them. Regional and national funding bodies and museums associations collect data on independent museums, but it is not cross referenced and is limited to their specific remits and areas of interest. They do not keep records on when museums opened and if they close, small museums often fall from view entirely, and the information that is available cannot be mapped or easily searched. In the first phase of the research we will collate and supplement existing information to establish a dataset of all UK museums from 1960-2020 and, in turn, build a database that is searchable according to factors including location, date of foundation, subject matter, size, type of museums, and combinations of these attributes. This information will be mapped visually and will be freely available in open source format on a project website to be hosted by the Bishopsgate Institute. In the second phase of the research we will use the database to identify patterns in the emergence, development and closure of independent museums and then seek to account for those trends (or anomalies) through the use of further visualisations, a focus group with Arts Council England staff, historical research, and an extensive series of interviews with staff in museums. This research will provide the first authoritative database of independent museums in the UK, and the first history of their recent development. It is important for academics in museum studies, arts management, cultural studies, and cultural and social history in that it will: 1. Provide a nuanced historical overview of the independent museum sector. 2. Provide a detailed analysis of a period of massive expansion and change within the museum sector. 3. Identify subjects that were or are of local or national concern. 4. Bring orthodox histories of the UK museum boom into question. 5. Demonstrate the scale and variety of the small independent museum sector, and hence of non-professional cultural production. 6. Generate resources for future researchers. The research will also have benefits for arts funders and policy-makers, and for staff in independent and public-sector museums in that it will: 1. Inform our understanding of the factors that underpin the emergence and closure of independent museums. 2.Track correlations between independent museums' emergence and specific funding streams. 3. Reveal regional differences across the museum sector. 4. Provide a solid knowledge base about their sector and thereby improve capacity for evidence-based advocacy and decision-making. We also anticipate the research being of interest to a general public in that it will: 1. Produce an oral history archive that can be used by amateur historians. 2. Raise awareness of volunteer-run organisations. 3. Offer volunteer-run museums an overview of their sector.

This project aims to (1) Build upon work on social media analytics from the Qualia project by taking that research in a new direction to develop deeper insights about mediated responses to arts and culture experiences, (2) expand on this prior research by including international expertise and cross disciplinary working- spanning arts technology, communication, sociology and computer science- to deliver new insights about social media analytics, (3) develop a preliminary model of the relationship between discourse on social media and authentic views held by social media users, based on researching discussions about arts and culture experiences occurring on social media, (4) establish an empirical basis for developing a new categorical sentiment analysis tool focusing on social media content using online ethnography and conversation analysis to identify the ways in which social media are used to communicate about arts and culture experiences and (5) Develop a new prototype open source sentiment analysis tool [SMILE] for arts and culture discourse to provide a practical test of the initial findings about automated social media analysis from the preceding Qualia project and (6) disseminate new sentiment analysis tool and associated research and practical recommendations through practitioner workshops and web-based communications. The project will research the potential of making otherwise expensive digital tools and techniques available to arts and culture organisations, while pushing the frontiers of applied research using machine learning technology. Meanwhile, we will develop new knowledge about the 'medium effects' that characterise arts and culture discourse within social media. We propose to conduct an online ethnography focusing on a small stratified random sample of Twitter users discussing partner arts and culture organisations on Twitter, aiming to uncover the relationship between online and offline discourse. A realistic understanding of the limits of what social media discourse can reveal is essential at this time when such data is widely seen as an unproblematic source of audience insights. Ultimately, the SMILE Project will deliver a Prototype Sentiment Analysis Tool for use on Twitter data ('SMILE tool') to provide a focal point for this research on the limits of social media analytics. The Sentiment Analysis tool will initially require developing a manually annotated corpus tuned and calibrated to arts and culture discourse. The SMILE sentiment analysis tool pulls tweets related to specified searches (i.e. for an arts organisation) from Twitter for processing. The SMILE tool extends beyond positive / negative, instead categorising responses according to 'quality of experience' categories, specific emotional responses and other relevant categories identified through the proposed online ethnography research and engagement with partner arts organisations. The SMILE analytic tool may offer organisations a more robust understanding of their online audiences, while establishing a transferable tool for measuring cultural demand and interests. Meanwhile, an interdisciplinary dialogue amongst the partners representing arts, computer science and social science perspectives will run alongside the tool development process. This dialogue will yield clear findings about the technical, methodological and practical limitations of this approach to understanding publics. The work proposed here will use an online ethnography study to develop a preliminary theoretical model for Twitter interactions. While our immediate focus is arts and culture discourse, the project holds broad implications for big data analysis.

This interdisciplinary project will be thematically structured around 3 issues: the values of culture; cultural work; and digitalised cultural consumption. It will focus on performing arts (e.g., theatre) and museums, two sectors that have been significantly affected by the pandemic and are under intense pressure to actively embrace the virtual. First, we will re-map the meanings and benefits of culture in the context of the pandemic via a systematic literature review and large-scale online surveys. From this, we will identify and describe the new, emerging social consensus regarding the values of culture and the purposes of cultural policy. Second, we will examine the functions of key institutions that affect the nature of cultural work (artists' unions, public funding, contracts, industry practices and relevant labour policy) and identify potential changes that would allow them to more effectively address the precarity of cultural work in the context of the continued impact of the pandemic. Third, via case studies of select performing arts organisations and museums, we will investigate how these entities reconcile their traditional beliefs in materiality and 'live' with the pressures to go digital in production and audience engagement. Cross-national online surveys will give us a bigger picture of whether and how the online delivery of digitalised cultural content can bring larger and more diverse audiences to culture. Across these three project themes, we will employ a mixed methodology, combining a systematic literature review, surveys, discussion panels, interviews and case studies. Many of our research events will be held online across the UK and Japan with simultaneous interpretation. Despite their differences in social structures and public attitudes toward culture, both Japan and the UK have continuously struggled to justify state subsidy for culture, and their funding systems were not directly connected with individual artists and cultural workers prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Cultural policymakers in both countries have also shown concern about the uneven level of public cultural participation and are keen to know whether and how this will change with the rise of digitalised cultural consumption. By pulling together the interdisciplinary expertise of the research team and involving stakeholders from the cultural sectors of the two countries, this research will help policymakers freshly engage with the core issues of cultural policy through cross-national conversation, learning and problem-solving. The Agency of Cultural Affairs (Japan), Mori Art Museum, Ohara Museum of Art, Arts Council England and Equity have agreed to be our project partners, and there will be additional partners from both countries. We will actively engage with cultural practitioners and with experts in artist labour, labour policy and law, contracts, copyright and digital technologies to explore specific policy measures to tackle the continued impact of the pandemic as well as unpredictable future risks. After the project ends, the UK-Japan project team will publish 2 co-edited books (1 in English, 1 in Japanese) and minimum 4 journal articles (2 in English/open access, 2 in Japanese) to widely disseminate the project findings in Japan and the UK and to international researchers and policymakers.

This unique consortium draws on the research excellence of interdisciplinary and complementary design innovation labs at three universities - Lancaster University, Newcastle University and the Royal College of Art and connects it with public and private sectors, linking large and small-scale businesses, service providers and citizens. Together, our expertise in developing and applying creative techniques to navigate unexplored challenges includes that of designers, artists, curators, producers, broadcasters, engineers, managers, technologists and writers - and draws on wider expertise from across the partner universities and beyond. The Creative Exchange responds to profound changes in practice in the creative and media-based industries stimulated by the opening of the digital public space, the ability of everyone to access, explore and create in any aspect of the digital space, moving from 'content consumption' to 'content experience'. It explores new forms of engagement and exchange in the broadcast, performing and visual arts, digital media, design and gaming sectors, by focusing on citizen-led content, interactive narrative, radical personalization and new forms of value creation in the context of the 'experience economy'. The primary geographic focus is the Northwest of England centred around the opportunity presented by the growth of MediaCityUK and its surrounding economy. The three universities act as local test beds with field trials in London, Lancaster and Newcastle prior to larger public facing trials in the northwest. This will support the North West regional strategy for growth in digital and creative media industries, whilst generating comparative research and development locally, nationally and internationally. The Creative Exchange has been developed in response to a paradigm shift in content creation and modes of distribution in a digitally connected world, which has profound impact for the arts and humanities. This transformational-change is taking place within the landscape of a growing digital public space that includes archives, data, information and content. How we navigate and experience this space - and how we generate content for and within it - is central to how we create economic, social, cultural and personal value. The Hub draws on new and agile approaches to knowledge exchange for the creative economy that have been previously developed by the partner universities and new ones co-developed with specialist arts organizations, sector organizations and communities of users.