Knowledge Partnerships

We work with a variety of businesses to develop projects and products for the Creative Industries including work in media, the arts, publishing, and new technologies.

Staff members have a keen commitment to talk with private sector companies and freelancers in the creative industries, either through current and previous staff work in sectors such as New Media, Television and Film, Journalism, Publishing and Bookselling, Advertising, and Theatre and Performance, through Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, or via innovation and research development in collaborative programmes.

The School emphasizes university level R&D in its approach to Knowledge Transfer, and members of the School have been active participants in Knowledge Transfer discussions undertaken by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Research Councils UK (RCUK)

A number of our research projects involve collaboration with external bodies such as Museums Archives and Libraries Wales, Snowdonia National Park Association, and the Jewish Museum in London.

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award

Cardiff Reform Synagogue

The project explores Jews as one of the key groups that have contributed to Welsh identity since 1945. Jewish immigration into and emigration from Wales has been a continuing feature of its history from that period until the present and is essential to understanding Welsh identity in the twenty-first century. It is an added facet that many of the original Jewish immigrants into Wales came from Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Ukraine and thus provide historical parallels with the new immigration from the EU accession states.

Beacon for Wales

Creating Superheroes

This public engagement project, led by Dyfrig Jones, involves working with secondary school pupils to create Welsh superheroes The aim of the project is to reflect upon how these superheroes articulate a sense of identity.

Jewish Life in North Wales

This project, in partnership with Gwynedd Museum & Art Gallery, collaborates with the public, particularly Jewish communities, in North Wales and promotes the study of the history of the Jewish community in the area. People will learn about Jewish history in North Wales through a touring exhibition. The exhibition will be held at a combination of university and public venues across North Wales (Bangor, Llandudno, Flint and Wrexham) during the spring/summer of 2010. The exhibition will involve the showing of the 1998 film Solomon and Gaenor, which details the relationship between a Welsh/Jewish couple in the south Wales coalfields during the turbulent years preceding the First World War. At each destination a one-day workshop will be run along with the exhibition, which will include talks about Jewish history as well as oral history techniques. Kosher refreshments will be provided allowing participants to learn about the Jewish dietary laws (kashrut) and to sample Jewish food/s.

This project will develop further links between Bangor University and the wider community. Local people will have the opportunity to work with two academics and a postgraduate student from the university, enabling members of the public who have not had previous contact with a university to realise that universities are not unapproachable or ‘ivory towers’. People taking part in the project will become aware that history is not something that happens to someone else, nor does it only involve ‘important’ or ‘famous’ people, but that they are involved in creating local histories themselves. The collection of oral history interviews will enable members of the public to take part in recording memories. They will also have an opportunity to learn how to ‘do’ local history by using local reference libraries and oral histories.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society (RLPO)

Members of the School are working with the School of Music to help the RLPO to film concert and expand the company’s worldwide audience via the Internet. Audio-video material is being recorded and edited for delivery over the RLP’s web site, to market events to local audiences, as well as providing rich content to media partners. The partnership is also allowing the RLP to provide a new service to promoters using the hall through the use of the company’s audio-video services.

Recordiau Sain

‘Digital Revolution’ offers opportunities to use Internet to raise awareness of products, digitally publish some items, and sell CDs for physical distribution- particularly in light of collapse of some major music distributors and changing store layout favouring ‘games’ of many retail stores (eg. HMV). The associate in this project is working with Sain staff to get added value from their digital catalog through multi-channel marketing and sales and links to commercial services such as SLIC. Business users such as radio stations, television and film companies increasingly expect the SLIC catalogue to appear in a digital format. Digital formats also open up new opportunities for business links with other Celtic countries and international markets with significant ‘Celtic’ interest (eg. USA).  The project will widen the exploitation potential of Sain’s substantial back-catalogue (of its own and acquired works). The project team is also working with the company to take control of its e-commerce web site, linking it into to new social networking opportunities and distribution channels.

 

Knowledge Economy Skills Scholarships (KESS)

Knowledge Economy Skills Scholarships (KESS) is a major European Convergence programme led by Bangor University on behalf of the HE sector in Wales. Benefiting from European Social Funds (ESF), KESS will support collaborative research projects (Research Masters and PhD) with external partners based in the Convergence area of Wales (West Wales and the Valleys).  KESS will run from 2009 until 2014 and will provide 400+ PhD and Masters places. Both the Research Masters and PhD elements are integrated with a high-level skills training programme, leading to a Postgraduate Skills Development Award.
The School has successfully applied for a number of KESS scholarships since the program began. Current projects include:

Utilizing Digital Technologies To Enhance Educational/Cultural Tourism to North Wales

Partner: Mentor Môn

Geographical Information System (GIS) technology is developing rapidly, and it is now a potentially powerful delivery system for many types of information, both textual and multimodal. This project will seek to develop that potential by linking GPS data to Internet-based resources to allow the creation of individual, on-the-fly edu-tourism itineraries.  The underpinning technologies for doing this (GPS, Internet delivery, wikis, hand-held appliances) already exist as commercial products. The innovative challenge of this project is to devise a model for leveraging those technologies to interpret the heritage landscape of Anglesey and other landscapes. The PhD candidate working on the project will need to identify the technologies that are available and develop case studies of how they are being used in other cultural landscapes. Cultural issues of space, place, landscape and spatial narratives will need to be considered and applied to the landscape of Anglesey before the development of a model for creating, delivering and maintaining these spatial, edu-tourism narratives.

The Anglesy Geological Sensoria Project 

Partner: GeoMôn

The goal of this project is to make use of innovations in multimedia and the use of GIS data to provide an enhanced experience for visitors to sites of natural, historical or cultural interest. The project will develop a multimedia database of stories, voices, sounds, paintings, photos and videos. This material will be made accessible on mobile devices using GIS data, allowing site visitors to access a deep context (social, historical, natural) to enhance their appreciation of the site. In effect, the visitor's mobile device will be identify where on the site the person is and deliver suitable content for that location, allowing them to see images or hear soundscapes of that spot from previous eras. Such a system is scalable and adaptable to other contexts, and will be adapted for delivery both within a “sensorium” established in the visitor centre and over the internet for prospective visitors.

Crowdsourcing, community building, and property markets: leveraging knowledge and community capital

Partner: Dayfydd Hardy Real Estate

Although community is not the product an estate agent sells, it is the value-added element that may be the core of the business. People buy houses for many reasons, but frequently these include quality of schools, availability of public transport, shopping, areas of natural beauty, places of worship, and other aspects of locality or what might be termed "sense of place." Two schools of theory regarding web development have the potential to allow estate agencies to leverage the sense of place in ways that have never before been possible. The first of these is "wikinomics", the theory explaining how the knowledge of crowds can be harnessed and collected in a cohesive framework to produce resources like Wikipedia. The second is articulated in the title of James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. The goal of this project is to apply these principles to the particular relationship that exists between an estate agent and the community in which it operates, using web 2.0 technologies that allow "crowdsourcing," community building, and data integration.