Prf Marie Gillespie

Monitoring and evaluation of the progress and impact of the site InfoMigrants.net

This projects aims at evaluating and visualising the impact of the British Council’s Social Media and Digital Resources associated with their global programme of events and projects to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare. The project will 1. assess the value of the Shakespeare anniversary programme and the impact it has had around the world especially on how Britain is perceived – whether the UK is seen as creative, welcoming, diverse, innovative. 2. assess the extent to which the Shakespeare Lives (SL) programme encouraged overseas publics to visit, work, do business, study in the UK and consume UK culture. 3. go beyond quantitative measures and assessment of reach to arrive at a deeper understanding of the quality of international interactions and intercultural dialogue generated by SL 4. provide a range of big data analyses and forms of evidence in attractive visual formats about how and where users have engaged with SL.

Continuation of refugee migration project: This project plugs a significant and damaging gap in information and news for refugees as they seek safety in Europe using smartphones. It builds on prior OU research on Refugees and Smartphones, as well on innovation in analytical and methodological frameworks for assessing the Cultural Value of digital resources. The findings of our prior research fed into a major bid to the European commission by three European international broadcasters (France 23, Deutsche Welle and ANSA) to collaborate on providing timely, relevant, high quality digital resources for refugees in order to reduce their reliance on misinformation and smuggler communication networks that is endangering their lives. The OU will work with these broadcasters as their sole academic partners to deploy our specialist research in refugees and uses of media to advise, engage in knowledge exchange in order to design a tailor-made Learning, Monitoring and Evaulation framework for this new initiative. This is vital as despite hundreds of such attempts to provide information and news for refugees, most have failed due to lack of specialist knowledge or resources that make them unsustainable ...

New BBC services for the Pakistani Diaspora

The BBC World Service and the British Council are the UK’s largest international cultural organisations: key national-to-global institutions charged with representing British identities and interests. They are very well known and respected abroad, but ‘at home’ in the UK, awareness of their activities is low. Little academic research has been done into the cultural value they channel and produce. Our project is timely and ambitious in its aim to produce an analytical and methodological framework adequate to understanding, evidencing and explaining the role of users of BBCWS and BC in curating, creating and translating cultural and artistic experiences abroad and at home. Both organisations’ futures are uncertain, with changes to funding and remit making this a good time to engage with them in re-assessing their roles. Uses of digital media, specifically visual resources, provide an apt methodological point of entry. Both organisations are investing digitally with the aim of engaging new audiences. For the World Service, internet is as important as radio or television in key markets, and the aim is to curate online audiences in a ‘global conversation’. The British Council is increasingly using internet to share the UK’s ‘great cultural assets’ and so ‘build trust’ worldwide. While real-time quantitative data on online activity is all too easy to gather, understanding the quality of cultural experiences among users and how they value such experience requires bringing appropriate social scientific methods to bear on users and user-derived data. The BBC World Service and British Council are either viewed in terms of their functions for British ‘soft power’, ‘public’ or ‘cultural’ diplomacy and ‘nation branding’, or in terms of vague notions of intercultural communication, cultural exchange and cosmopolitanism. Both perspectives rely on untested assumptions about the intrinsic value of the cultural experiences these institutions offer. With a robust methodological design, capitalising on a recently concluded 5-year AHRC-funded project on interculturality at the World Service and extensive work evaluating British Council projects, our research will capture empirically and comparatively the nature, scope and scale of the components of cultural value produced or mobilised by these international organisations, and so to develop- new concepts to underpin future understandings of cultural value.

This policy fellowship synthesises the findings of 'Tuning In' - an AHRC funded collaborative research project conducted over the last three years on the BBC World Service (including research findings presented in five special journal issues, three co-edited volumes and over 150 other academic and non academic outputs). It will engage with BBCWS and Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) partners in order to offer a measured assessment of the extent to which interactive news media can and do foster intercultural dialogue around global and strategic issues. In collaboration with partners with whom we have already established good working relations over the last 5 years, we will deliver new methods for evaluating the success (or otherwise) of initiatives in this field. The work of this Policy Fellowship will be of relevance not only to researchers, practitioners and policy-makers at the WS and to the FCO but also to other similar news providers (Deutsch Welle, Voice of America, France 24) and international organisations (e.g. British Council, Goethe Institute, Alliance Francaise) engaged in public diplomacy.

“CyberBibles” examines the impact of digitization on the relationship between readers and sacred texts. Three successful commercial Bible study platforms have been selected for study, each using multimedia, social media and mobile media to encourage users to read and share in new ways. This nine-month project explores three questions. What relationship with text is promoted through product design and marketing discourse? What practices of reading and networks of interpretation are emerging between users? How does digitization change the materiality and structure of text?