This project aims to increase knowledge and understanding of the contemporary feature-length documentary film industry in the UK. It has three core objectives: 1) to map the industry and analyse its operation; 2) to historicise the industry's formation and the factors that have shaped its development; and 3) to investigate the criticisms and challenges the industry faces and explore how these might be addressed. Documentary has formed a major part of British film culture ever since John Grierson, the figurehead of the British Documentary Movement (1926-46), coined the term in 1926. However, with so much British scholarship focusing on that period and its achievements, subsequent developments have been marginalised. One of those developments has been the emergence of a feature documentary industry comprised of organisations dedicated to the production of feature-length (70 minutes or more) films for broadcast or theatrical exhibition that is distinct from - albeit often related to - factual or specialist factual television production). Since the beginning of the 21st century, feature-length documentaries have experienced a major upsurge in popularity and become a significant global box-office attraction. Although this is most obviously evidenced by US films such as Farenheit 9/11 (2004) or An Inconvenient Truth (2006), a range of UK feature documentaries have enjoyed significant (critical if not necessarily commercial) success, including Black Gold (2005), The End of the Line (2008), Selfmade (2010), Up in Smoke (2011), the Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing (2012), and the Oscar-winning Citizen Four (2014). As a result, the UK feature documentary industry is now an established part of the broader film and television industries, with distinct subsectors dedicated to finance, production, distribution and exhibition. Yet despite its established presence, and the fact that UK documentary is widely acknowledged to be experiencing a 'golden age' (Sight & Sound, September 2014, p. 52), little scholarly attention has been paid to the industrial structures underpinning it. There is thus a timely and urgent need to study the UK documentary industry if its current economic and cultural success is to be understood, supported and sustained. This project has been developed in association with three institutional partners - the British Film Institute (BFI), Creative England and The Grierson - as well as five partners from each of the industry's main subsectors (finance, production, distribution and exhibition): The BRITDOC Foundation is the leading broker of documentary film finance and distribution in the UK; Dartmouth Films is one of the UK's most influential documentary production companies; Dogwoof is the UK's leading documentary distributor; Sheffield Doc/Fest is the preeminent documentary film festival in the UK; and Yaddo, the UK's first documentary webcaster, was launched in 2016 by the former head of BBC Storyville, the UK's leading broadcast platform. All partners will participate in the research via a series of semi-structured interviews, while the partners from the industry's subsectors will also take part in a period of Participant Observation. Combined with desk-based analyses of primary and secondary materials (academic literature, trade press, close analysis of the films themselves), this comprehensive methodology will best enable the three core objectives to be addressed. The project will have a number of tangible applications and benefits to the industry in addition to the range of academic outputs it will generate. The policy proposals will provide the BFI and Creative England with evidence-based, practically-applicable recommendations. Together with the Doc/Fest workshops and project website, these will facilitate knowledge exchange between academia and industry that will expand understanding and work towards a more sustainable, innovative and culturally and economically successful documentary industry.

The UK's creative industries are a national economic strength. Since the turn of the decade, employment, exports and output growth has easily outstripped that in the rest of the economy. Yet, behind this rapid growth lies structural challenges and business uncertainties. And while there has also been rapid growth in academic research on the creative industries, major gaps remain in the evidence base. The PEC will seek to address these and bring about a step change in the quality and quantity of evidence used to inform decision-making with respect to the creative industries. We propose to organise the PEC's work activities in five overlapping workstrands, each led by an expert UK research centre, and coordinated through a Management Board, chaired by Nesta. We indicate our current thinking on priorities below, however in the first year of the PEC's operation we will consult extensively with industry and policymakers on research questions and beyond that keep the PEC's research agenda relevant and inclusive through ongoing engagement and a mixture of commissioning research activities. In workstrand 1 Creative Clusters, led by the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University, we want to map and visualise the UK's creative clusters by mining official, open and online data sources, and plugging data gaps using a survey instrument based on that used in the AHRC-funded Brighton Fuse and Creative Fuse North East studies. We will investigate local spillovers between creative and other industries, and conduct foresight activities that will engage industry and policymakers on future opportunities and challenges. In workstrand 2 Skills, Talent and Diversity, led by The Work Foundation, we will track the evolving employment needs of the creative industries. The supply of talent to the creative industries has failed to keep pace with demand - a challenge exacerbated by a lack of diversity. Further, technological, consumer and global trends are driving a shift in production methods and commercial models, creating the need for 'fused' creative, digital and entrepreneurial skills. The PEC will explore how industry, policymakers and educators should respond. In workstrand3 Intellectual Property, Business Models, Access to Finance and Content Regulation, led by CREATe at Glasgow University, we want to develop digital and open data tools that consolidate the evidence on the effects of IP rights on creative production and consumption, changes in business models, and the emerging data economy. We will undertake research on the challenges for the production, distribution and international exploitation of UK AV content in the context of evolving technologies, globalisation and Brexit. We will also research barriers to finance in the creative industries and how policies should address these. In workstrand4 Arts, Culture and Public Service Broadcasting, led by the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University, we want to focus on the opportunities and risks for value creation in creative industries arising from public investment in cultural institutions and public service broadcasters. A priority will be to analyse the challenges arising from the use of digital technologies in the arts, entertainment and news (including platform expansion, data analytics and personalisation, and experimentation), and what policymakers, regulators and funders can do to support the creation of value. In workstrand 5 Creative Industries and International Competitiveness, led by Newcastle University Business School, we will deliver a better understanding of the UK's creative industries in the international economy, including how FDI, immigration and trade influences the spatial distribution of the creative industries. We also propose to improve our understanding of the consequences of Brexit for the creative industries and to inform international trade and investment policies to promote their interests going forward.

EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital Entertainment University of Bath and Bournemouth University The Centre for Digital Entertainment (CDE) supports innovative research projects in digital media for the games, animation, visual effects, simulation, cultural and healthcare industries. Being an Industrial Doctorate Centre, CDE's students spend one year being trained at the university and then complete three years of research embedded in a company. To reflect the practical nature of their research they submit for an Engineering Doctorate degree. Digital media companies are major contributors to the UK economy. They are highly-respected internationally and find their services in great demand. To meet this demand they need to employ people with the highest technical skills and the imagination to use those skills to a practical end. The sector has become so successful that the shortage of such people now constrains them from expanding further. Our Doctoral Training Centre is already addressing that and has become the national focus for this kind of training. We do this by combining core taught material with an exciting and unusual range of activities designed to challenge and extend the students' knowledge beyond the usual boundaries. By working closely with companies we can offer practical challenges which really push the limits of what can be done with digital media and devices, and by the people using them. We work with many companies and 40-50 students at any one time. As a result we are able to support the group in ways which would not be possible for individual students. We can place several students in one company, we can send teams to compete in programming competitions, and we can send groups to international training sessions. This proposal is to extend and expand this successful Centre. Major enhancements will include use of internationally leading industry experts to teach Master Classes, closer cooperation between company and university researchers, business training led by businesses and options for international placements in an international industry. We will replace the entire first year teaching with a Digital Media programme specifically aimed at these students as a group. The graduates from this Centre will be the technical leaders of the next generation revolution in this fast-moving, demanding and exciting industry.

Within almost every discipline related to the digital economy, there are critical and emerging issues around humans and the data they generate either directly, or as a byproduct of their endeavours. Equally, the data economy has stimulated a range of initiatives responses within each of the three sectors (public, private and third), as well as a broad portfolio of research across relevant disciplines. However, while such important work is ongoing, such these efforts are often disparate and tend not to feed directly back into the science of data-driven systems itself. There is an urgent need to guide the realisation of system design principles that are productive, and yet fit with the ethics and values acceptable to wider society. Those who are expert in development of the systems, algorithms and analytics that raise such issues face challenging culture gaps: firstly, with regard to those who are expert in areas such as the arts and humanities, and secondly with regard to those who are inexpert in technology but who are increasingly impacted by it in their everyday lives. Core to these divisions are issues such as a lack of social understanding of the technical capabilities of data-driven systems, inconsistency of research and development effort across sectors and disciplines, and tensions between industrial, societal and academic drivers, and human needs. Such tensions are visible in several domains, though few as pointedly critical as health. One need only look at NHS' efforts to protect individuals' medical records, in contrast to contrasted against the corporate monetization of DNA samples, as individuals take advantage of advances in low-cost mobile self-monitoring and diagnosiseek low cost solutions to their health-managements. Here, state, corporate and individual-level drivers create inconsistent approaches to the management and value of data. It is time to draw together, consolidate and formalise our efforts across disciplines. We must now seek to structure further endeavour, while considering how new and emerging systems are realised, received and responded to-not just within the bounds of the DE but cross-sector, i.e. within the range of organisations and communities that reflect and support daily human activity and concern. At a sectoral level, industry has often focused narrowly on either corporate monetisation of data from individuals, or individuals' efficiency and short-term optimisation of personal metrics (e.g. the 'quantified self'). Market pressures mean that technical advances are increasingly implemented before social and cultural effects can be determined. This means, however, that data-intensive systems to support long term social, cultural and creative benefits are rare. At the same time, academic research has often focused on questions of interest more to itself than to other sectors. Academic work with public and third sector organisations has been fragmented, with interactions often weighted in favour of shorter term innovation cycles rather than longer term social needs. Such challenges, divergences and tensions lead to duplications, contradictions, and unproductive effort. This is the problem space within which we operate. Our network a holistic and inclusive network approach, sensitive to the socially situated nature of such systems. To achieve this we will (a) develop and sustain a collaborative, cross-sectoral community under the banner of Human Data Interaction, (b) develop a portfolio of system design projects addressing underexplored aspects of the DE (c) create cross-sectoral interdisciplinary synthesis of research under the HDI banner (d) conceptually develop and flesh-out the HDI framework, (e) create a suite of policy and public-facing case studies, papers, prototypes and educational materials, and (f) develop a set of core guidelines intended to inform the design of human-facing data-driven systems.

The creative industries are crucial to UK social and cultural life and one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors of the economy. Games and media are key pillars for growth in the creative industries, with UK turnovers of £3.5bn and £12.9bn respectively. Research in digital creativity has started to be well supported by governmental funds. To achieve full impact from these investments, translational and audience-facing research activities are needed to turn ideas into commercial practice and societal good. We propose a "Digital Creativity" Hub for such next-step research, which will produce impact from a huge amount of research activity in direct collaboration with a large group of highly engaged stakeholders, delivering impact in the Digital Economy challenge areas of Sustainable Society, Communities and Culture and New Economic Models. York is the perfect location for the DC Hub, with a fast-growing Digital Creativity industry (which grew 18.4% from 2011 to 2012), and 4800 creative digital companies within a 40-mile radius of the city. The DC Hub will be housed in the Ron Cooke Hub, alongside the IGGI centre for doctoral training, world-class researchers, and numerous small hi-tech companies. The DC Hub brings: - A wealth of research outcomes from Digital Economy projects funded by £90m of grants, £40m of which was managed directly by the investigators named in the proposal. The majority of these projects are interdisciplinary collaborations which involved co-creation of research questions and approaches with creative industry partners, and all of them produced results which are ripe for translational impact. - Substantial cash and in-kind support amounting to pledges of £9m from 80 partner organisations. These include key organisations in the Digital Economy, such as the KTN, Creative England and the BBC, major companies such as BT, Sony and IBM, and a large number of SMEs working in games and interactive media. The host Universities have also pledged £3.3m in matched funding, with the University of York agreeing to hire four "transitional" research fellows on permanent contracts from the outset leading to academic positions as a Professor, a Reader and two Lecturers. - Strong overlap with current projects run by the investigators which have complementary goals. These include the NEMOG project to study new economic models and opportunities for games, the Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence (IGGI) centre for doctoral training, with 55+ PhDs, and the Falmouth ERA Chair project, which will contribute an extra 5 five-year research fellowships to the DC Hub, leveraging £2m of EC funding for translational research in digital games technologies. - A diverse and highly active base of 16 investigators and 4 named PDRAs across four universities, who have much experience of working together on funded research projects delivering high-impact results. The links between these investigators are many and varied, and interdisciplinarity is ensured by a group of investigators working across Computer Science, Theatre Film and TV, Electronics, Art, Audio Production, Sociology, Education, Psychology, and Business. - Huge potential for step-change impact in the creative industries, with particular emphasis on video game technologies, interactive media, and the convergence of games and media for science and society. Projects in these areas will be supported by and feed into basic research in underpinning themes of data analytics, business models, human-computer interaction and social science. The projects will range over impact themes comprising impact projects which will be specified throughout the life of the Hub in close collaboration with our industry partners, who will help shape the research, thus increasing the potential for major impact. - A management team, with substantial experience of working together on large projects for research and impact in collaboration with the digital creative industries.