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).

This proposed project aims to understand how creative interventions help develop connectivity and resilience for older people. This will be achieved through critical reflection on the outcomes from a range of relevant projects across the Connected Communities portfolio such as community gardening, filmmaking, built environment, product design, digital media theatre, music, cultural learning and visual arts interventions for those with early stage dementia. Juxtaposing the results from different projects will result in innovative ways of thinking about resilience and propose solutions to issues raised by community partners. Four seminars will be undertaken consisting of presentations, workshops, and breakout sessions. Synthesising learning points from across the Connected Communities portfolio will help draw together the diverse, yet shared issues. Equal Arts, the C.I. and main community partner will recruit a group of older people who will play a full part in the workshops and explore what resilience and connectivity means to them. Researcher participants will also be invited to bring along community partners to ensure discussion is grounded in their lived experience. Policy makers such as Arts Council England will also be involved and part of the management group to ensure that they are part of the process.

This proposed project from Newcastle University originates from three complimentary areas of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences who have a long standing interest in working with communities. They are the: International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies (ICCHS) Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts (NCLA) School of Architecture Planning and Landscape (SAPL) The proposed work involves 18 academic researchers from the above research units. Three 'open days' are proposed each of which relate to the research units areas of interest - they will take place at venues associated with partner organisations: Beamish Museum, County Durham The Great North Museum: Hancock, Newcastle upon Tyne Gateshead Town Hall, Gateshead Researchers will help formulate research questions, support the research activities themselves, help interpret findings, advise on dissemination, help evaluate of the project (effectiveness of collaboration), support community groups in capturing learning from the project, continue to support community groups for future activities and, for some projects, facilitate more in-depth co-production of activities. The partner organisations and identified community heritage groups will help provide direction to the activities The partner organisations will help provide access to the heritage groups that they have contact with.

In the past few decades, there has been a surge of international interest in the role of the arts and culture in healthcare, public health and health promotion, on an individual and community level. However, the vast majority of research studies have focused on the effects of targeted, time-limited arts interventions on particular patient groups. Yet, much of the arts and cultural engagement across the UK is not confined to specific interventions but involves a more general, ubiquitous participation that can be harder to measure through experimental studies. A select number of public health studies have found associations between cultural participation (including attending concerts, museums and galleries) and self-reported health, as well as inverse associations between cultural participation and mortality risk. However, important questions remain, and to date, there have been no large-scale public health studies examining the impact of the arts in the UK. This project is led by the Centre for Performance Science, an internationally distinctive partnership of the Royal College of Music and Imperial College London, with an extensive track record in arts, health and social research. It explores the effect of (i) activities that involve actively 'doing' (e.g. music, dance, art, photography and drama) and (ii) activities that require physical attendance (e.g. attending concerts, monuments, museums, galleries, cinemas, heritage archives and theatre); (iii) 'home-based' activities (e.g. listening to the radio, watching TV, reading, storytelling, using arts-based apps, digital arts experiences, online music co-production). Our research questions identify the impact of the arts and culture on individual, social and economic measures of health and wellbeing, as well as explore how associations vary between different socioeconomic, geographical and ethnic populations within the UK. To explore these questions, the project is organised into four work packages. Work package 1 will involve assessing existing data including undertaking a meta-analysis of previous studies and exploring a UK cohort study that includes some questions on the arts. However, recognising the limited data currently available, work packages 2 and 3 are based on a large-scale national survey to be carried out during our study. Open to all adults in the UK, the survey will target the general population as well as participants diagnosed with one of four major health conditions facing the UK: mental health, cancer, cardiovascular disease and chronic respiratory diseases. These conditions have all previously been researched in smaller arts-in-health intervention studies but not at a public health level, and their inclusion will facilitate understanding of the relationships between culture and the individual, social and economic facets of health and wellbeing. A total of 25,000 participants will be recruited to complete an anonymous online questionnaire consisting of demographic questions, validated psychological scales and economic metrics, assessments of arts and cultural participation and self-reporting of health. Work package 2 will explore the questions with a cross-sectional analysis of these data with nested case-control studies; work package 3 will monitor a sub-section of the sample as a cohort for the following year with 6-monthly updates to track longitudinal change in arts engagement. Recognising the complexity of cultural engagement and health, work package 4 will add context to the survey data, with a sub-sample of survey participants taking part in qualitative telephone interviews to explore motivations for, and experiences of, arts engagement across the UK and how this is reported to intersect with health behaviours, perceptions and outcomes. Through the extensive epidemiology methods proposed, an ambitious sample size and nested qualitative data, the findings promise to redefine the value of the arts and culture for public health in the UK.