Context: In January 2022, the Newcastle Material Culture Analytical Suite (NeMCAS) was established through CapCo, with support from Newcastle's World Class Laboratories fund, upgrading and expanding equipment for imaging and analysis of archaeological and heritage collections. We offer an unrivalled range of expertise in heritage materials including glass, metals, ceramics, environmental and organic artefacts, and are one of the few places in the world that can offer integrated thin section analysis and µCT imaging, optimised for humanities research. NeMCAS has seen considerable internal and external demand in the first 18 months of operation, and the potential applications and benefits are diverse. We have already supported work by academics and stakeholders for example: Additional research for projects funded by AHRC, Leverhulme, EPSRC Enabled new research funded by BBSRC, British Academy, AHRC, EU commission Contributed to research and an exhibition for the Great North Museum Conservation work for English Heritage and Norwich Castle Museum Commercial analysis of concrete additives for a British building materials company Other applications include non-destructive internal imaging of a wide range of cultural objects and archaeological materials, taphonomic experiments to inform preservation and conservation including impacts of climate and environmental change, and multiproxy analysis of archaeological sediments and heritage materials to understand the local environment in which objects have been deposited. Challenge 1: there is a huge demand for sample preparation for large-format thin section analysis (required for a wide range of analytical techniques). Following the closure of facilities at Stirling, there is nowhere else in the UK that can provide this for external users. Researchers now outsource to Europe and USA, where facilities uniformly have backlogs of >6 months. This includes the academic and UK commercial archaeology sectors and IROs such as Historic Environment Scotland. Challenge 2: The combination of 2D and 3D imaging is becoming the standard in areas such as soil science to provide the most comprehensive information on composition and structure. In archaeological and heritage science research however, µCT has not been easily accessible. The majority of µCT facilities in the UK are designed for STEM or Medicine, and are not easily accessible for SHAPE research, especially for the research base in the north. The demand for access to our µCT facilities highlights a growing interest in the potential of this approach to investigate questions related to object composition, ancient technology, for informing conservation, and for recording materials such as teeth/bone and their micro-environmental context prior to destructive sampling for isotopes and aDNA. Crucially, there are no UK facilities where researchers can combine both of these methodologies. Aims and Objectives: Our aims are to: Provide a new dedicated, fully accessible laboratory facility to co-locate equipment for sample preparation and analysis with capacity for large numbers of users Purchase an additional bespoke µCT and high specification PCs, to increase capacity, resolution, and enable rapid automated analysis of high-demand objects Provide a space where materials and their surrounding soil/sediment matrix can be simultaneously sampled for further analyses, in combination with µCT and ultra-high-resolution microscopy Establish the administrative and management infrastructure to enable external users to access the facility for collaborative and commercial work.

This research aims to explore the relationships between identity, place, and art. It will focus on people's responses to artworks within the collection of the Laing Art Gallery and its permanent display 'Art on Tyneside'. The Laing is the flagship art venue of Tyne and Wear Museums (TWM) and is based in Newcastle city centre. \n\nThe 'Art on Tyneside' display opened in 1991 and took a novel approach by displaying art, both historical and modern, in relation to its geographical context: Tyneside. It was felt that a familiar frame of reference - that of local place - could engage local non-visitors and 'humanise' the gallery as its then director David Fleming put it. Over its first few months the Gallery did indeed attract 70% more visits compared to the same period in the previous year. However, it also attracted media criticism from those who objected to the socio-historical approach taken to the interpretation and to the inclusion of interactives. Regardless of the different responses, this display was innovative and received significant critical attention. \n\nNow over seventeen years old, the 'Art on Tyneside' display is scheduled for redevelopment by 2010. Things have changed considerably not only in terms of Tyneside's thriving art-scene and the way that museums and galleries aim to appeal to new visitors, but also in terms of new possibilities offered by digital technology. This redevelopment therefore presents curators from the Laing Art Gallery and academics working at Newcastle University with an ideal opportunity to revisit the original ideas behind the display. These experts will draw upon recent academic research about place, identity, curation, audiences, and the use of technology within gallery visiting to create a new display for a contemporary audience. \n\nTo achieve this goal, the researchers propose to give members of the public the chance to be creatively involved in the new display. Participants will be given the chance to either feature in a short-documentary, try their hand at new digital storytelling techniques, record an oral history, or take photographs. The researchers hope that by asking members of the public to get involved creatively, this will offer a new insight into how people think about place, identity, and art. The audio-visual materials produced by participants will be integrated into the new display to show the diverse ways that people think about place, identity, and art and to help the display appeal to a range of potential visitors. \n\nParticipants will be drawn from a wide range of groups including families, community groups and those who have never before visited the Laing Art Gallery. Tyne and Wear has an excellent track-record of working with a diverse range of visitors and community groups. Those with a specialist interest in art and a knowledge of the North-East's art-scene will also be given a chance to contribute to ensure that the display includes a variety of perspectives. Along the way, researchers will give regular feedback to the staff and exhibition design team so that both the audience's perspectives and the academic ideas can be fed into the new display from the outset. \n\nThe films, photographs, and stories generated through the research process will be collected and cared for by Tyne and Wear Museums so that future researchers and exhibitions can also make use of them. An additional benefit is that the project will bring academics in the University and curators in the city's museums and galleries closer together enabling them to share their knowledge. The two organisations are already working together on the city's Great North Museum project. The 'Art on Tyneside' project also provides a chance for audiences to go behind the scenes in the Laing Art Gallery and to be part of the process of redeveloping this important public display.\n\nThe research project will run from summer 2008 to summer 2010 when the new display will open to the public.

The increasingly widespread use of Information Technology (IT) in most spheres of human activity since the mid-20th century has facilitated & continues to generate digital electronic natural language text/audio/graphics on a huge scale. Arts & Humanities (A&H) research has benefitted from this in that the volume of such materials available for study has greatly increased. Moreover, other fields like Statistics, Information Retrieval & Data Mining have provided computational tools for analysis/interpretation of data abstracted from these A&H resources. A major aspect of the impact of IT & allied subject areas on A&H research has been the creation of discipline-specific collections via digitisation of legacy materials or synthesis of these with new ones. After several decades' activity, the volume of such collections both in the UK & worldwide is both very large & showing no sign of receding. \nAs the number of domain-specific collections has grown, a variety of conceptual/technical issues having to do with the preservation/re-use of such resources have arisen. \n\nThe AHRC's DEDEFI call focuses on two of them: \n(i) Given that such collections are typically generated in academic environments for academic use & resourced by public funding bodies, how can one ensure their longevity so that the financial/human investment in them is not wasted, i.e. how can they be made sustainable?\n(ii) How can the potential of the collections be extended beyond HE to schools/museums & to the general public, that is, how can they achieve even greater social impact?\n\nThe present application addresses these two issues with respect to an existing AHRC-funded collection, the 'Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English' (NECTE) (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/necte). NECTE amalgamated two legacy databases of Tyneside English, the 'Tyneside Linguistic Survey' & the 'Phonological Variation & Change in Contemporary Spoken English' project, into a single resource. This process conformed to global standards for the documentation/digitisation of such data & was undertaken using the latest IT technology available. NECTE was intended primarily as a resource for academic linguistic/socio-historical research. Since its publication on the Web in 2005, it has been extensively used both by its creators & by other researchers for that purpose. \n\nThis proposal aims to develop NECTE in ways that enhance both its sustainability and impact. In overview, the objective is to augment the corpus content in several respects & to create a new website that supersedes the existing one & makes the content more accessible to academic/non-academic users in ways appropriate to these respective communities. The augmentation comprises updating to the current global documentation standards, linking the corpus with recently collected/digitised Tyneside speech (2007-2009) as well as digitized photographic materials from collections at Beamish (http://www.beamishcollections.com/rrc/photo.asp), the Northern Region Film & TV Archive (http://www.nrfta.org.uk/) & Tyne & Wear Museums & Archives (http://www.tyneandweararchives.org.uk/).\nFor academic users, the new website offers download facilities & documentation that are essentially identical to those of the existing NECTE website, though the latter would be updated to reflect new standards & the changes to the content already described. For non-academic users (especially those in the educational/museum sectors), the website offers topic-based browsing of the resource such that, selecting different menus will present the user with linked audio/text/photographic data. By doing so, we will meet the challenge of preserving/enhancing the value of the Linguistic 'Time Capsule' that is NECTE by using state-of-the-art technologies to accommodate the quite distinctive web searching behaviours & demands of the 'Google Generation' (Kuiper et al. 2008;Nicholas & Rowlands 2008).

UK museum and art gallery policy can be described as being instrumental in nature. Since the 1980s museums and galleries, in common with the arts sector generally, have been used instrumentally by the UK government to attempt to attain objectives in social policy areas, such as resolving problems of social exclusion. This approach in the modern context has its origins in the introduction of the 'New Public Management' which was a response to fiscal pressures and an attempt by Government to manage the public sector by adopting principles and practices derived from the private sector. An interesting aspect of instrumental policy is that increasingly evidence is needed to demonstrate success in achieving policy objectives. \n\nThe policy response to the need to demonstrate impact has been the development of models that can be adopted by museum and gallery practitioners to measure impact, such as learning. The methodologies associated with these models have been difficult to implement, by practitioners, because of unresolved issues such as defining what learning is in a museum or gallery. While practitioners and policy makers recognise the difficulties associated with such an approach to policy practical solutions have yet to be identified. There is also a debate over how value can be described and increasing the concept of 'public value' is coming to the fore as a way of understanding how dialogue and engagement with users can guide policy construction. \n\nThe proposed workshops will bring together policy makers, practitioners and academic researchers to address these issues. This has not happened before, to any extent, as each of these sectors has their own methods of working and operates within a particular political environment. This means that the potential benefits of joint working, to all parties, have not been explored. Increasingly the possible benefits of such an approach are being recognised by, for example, the Museums, Libraries and Archive Council, the body that advises on and implements the development of museum and gallery policy in England. The workshops will also draw on the experience of the United States of America where museum and gallery policy is also largely instrumental in nature. \n\nThe workshops will result in a new collaboration between museum and gallery practitioners, policy makers and academic researchers to develop new partnerships and to share best practice. They will explore the impact of instrumental 'evidence-based' museum and gallery policy upon practice and develop possible new approaches to museum and gallery policy. They will also plan for future collaborative research that would involve all parties. The results of the workshops will be disseminated through publication, conference papers and a web-based resource. The group, once established, would address a range of other issues surrounding museum and gallery policy in the future.\n\n

The (Multi)Cultural Organisational Archives project aims to begin to catalogue, collect and publicise the dispersed archives of BAME organisations involved in cultural and community development in the North East of England. The project follows on from the Northumbria University AHRC-funded research '(Multi)Cultural Heritage', a partnership with several minority-led organisations in Newcastle and Manchester. That project had two areas of study: the operations of these organisations and their shared issues, and, their ideas about culture, identity and heritage reflected in their work. One impact of that project was the expressed desire by these groups to continue the conversations past the deadline of the fellowship, take on themselves an uber-organising role to build capacity, leadership and promotion of BAME culture in the North East. They voiced that a first step in this work was to undertake archival collection and preservation of the diverse materials and oral histories or 'living archive' about their organisations' activities in the past. This archives project will undertake the following activities, over a 12 month period starting February 2020: 1. Catalogue and begin to assemble original and digital documentary and artefact materials, appropriate for archiving, related to the organisational history of BAME-led culture-sector organisations in the North East from the year 2000. Participant organisations will include but not limited to core project cooperators Sangini, Vamos, and NEEACA. Additional materials from a number of other BAME-oriented organisations both currently operating and extant, would be included in the search; 2. Produce interviews and oral histories related to the workers and volunteers involved in BAME-led culture-sector organisations in the North East, from the year 2000; 3. Digitise and release a curated selection of the materials via YouTube, Vimeo, Historypin and Wikipedia, as well as a display at Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums (TWAM), to achieve a wide public dissemination of the project; 4. Maintain a close partnership among core and broader partners and stakeholders in order to accomplish 1,2 and 3, through a series of workshops, focus group consultations and training sessions every two months; 5. Work closely with TWAM to investigate and generate a sustainable model for hosting, collaborating and cross-pollination between project partners and public institutions for further activities beyond the project to guide future museum/archives policies and processes; 6. Establish a strategy and methodology for assessing impact of the archival materials and distributed media via quantitative and qualitative data beyond the time limits of the project. One postdoctoral researcher will be hired by Northumbria University to undertake the bulk of the work. All three cooperating organisations (Sangini, Vamos, NEEACA) would receive project funds to enable planning and carrying out the archival cataloguing, assembly and digitisation. Several organisations with archives expertise would be consulted and provide advice and training to serve project needs. Three will form an advisory board to the project, and offer a formal partnership: Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (TWAM), the Angelou Centre, and Everyday Muslim Heritage & Archive Initiative. Engagement and Impact will be focused on regional BAME cultural organisations, both the three cooperating organisations, and extended and affiliated groups working in the cultural and heritage sectors. The general public, including BAME publics, will benefit from the web-based curatorial project, which will seek to link to other online public history ventures locally and nationally (for example Historic England's 100 places initiative and ACE's Change Makers site). Policy organisations mobilised through the original fellowship, '(Multi)Cultural Heritage', will also be drawn into the planning and workshop activities discussed above.