A year of SIAH

Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities (SIAH) is celebrating its first birthday. Professor Nicky Marsh, Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, gave us an insight into its successes over the last 12 months and how enterprise activity has played a pivotal role.

“SIAH was launched in October 2020 in order to raise the visibility of our Arts and Humanities researchers and to enable them to lead on large research and enterprise projects,” explained Nicky. “We started with four priority questions to guide our mission – what does it mean to be well, how does technology make us, how do we weather uncertainty, what does it mean to rebuild and recover? Within SIAH we aim to align our critical and creative methodologies with the Government’s ‘grand challenges’, focusing contemporary research across the University and beyond.”

In its first year, SIAH began to answer these four questions by assembling crossdisciplinary expertise in research, enterprise and knowledge exchange.

Within SIAH there are two Co-Directors, Stephanie Jones and Jo Sofaer. Stephanie is responsible for project incubation and also leads on the Environmental Humanities; she works closely with SIAH theme leads Shelley Cobb (Wellbeing and Culture) and Seth Giddens (Science and Technology). Jo leads on Enterprise and Knowledge Exchange. Her work in running network events and developing external partnerships is supported by two Research Fellows in Creative Engagement, Adam Procter and Dan Ashton.

Capability for Collections “In order to allow us to offer cutting-edge facilities to our researchers and partners, renewal of our digital infrastructure was a priority in SIAH’s first year,” said Nicky. “We collaborated with colleagues from theLibrary to win a prestigious £710,000 AHRC Capability for Collections grant that allowed us to overhaul and renew our digital estate. We increased capabilities in digitisation and investigation of portable material culture and paper-based archives. We have furthered our competencies in digitisation and investigation of landscapes and the built environment, whilst also improving data handling, visualisation and engagement.”

Public policy Understanding the role that Arts and Humanities research plays in shaping cultural policy, especially in the post-COVID context, became a pressing theme in first year of SIAH. The Institute hosted a series of webinars called RESET2020 , which explored the policy challenges faced by the cultural and heritage sectors.

Nicky said: “For the webinar series we partnered with politicians, civil servants and regulators, including Andy Haldane from the Bank of England and Louise Smith from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.” The idea was to bring these figures into dialogue with policy makers from the Arts and Heritage sectors in order to better understand issues around culture and Levelling Up, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and the creative industries.

SIAH has this year hosted two Knowledge Exchange Fellows from Historic England’s Wellbeing and Inclusion Team. They worked on developing heritage-based opportunities for social prescribing through the RESET2020 webinar series.

These events built on the research expertise in the Arts and Humanities on issues around EDI, and current debates within the cultural and creative sectors. This expertise includes AHRC projects on women and film production; mentoring, diversity and poetry; publishing in Southern Africa; queer music and music theory; the accessibility of galleries and digital media justice.

Enterprise and technology “We have supported a growing portfolio in creative technologies and on the interface between design and new technologies,” said Nicky. “Our projects range from building a creative AI Lab and collaborating with Wimbledon Football Club on a digital museum of sport, to developing approaches for website-responsive composition. There is potential to further expand these relationships across a variety of scales and disciplines. We are already doing this across the region and have, for example, completed a large scoping project on digital creative industries across the central South.”

SIAH is also working and collaborating nationally and internationally. It has researchers working with leading social media platforms and collaborating in the creation of an Innovative Hub in China (working in Suzhou’s Industry Park). The Institute is also working with colleagues in the Winchester School of Art as they develop a Global Smart Lab and Data Image Lab that will coordinate expertise in games design, AI projects, digital service design, AR/VR design and smart textiles.

Enterprise and regeneration SIAH contributes to University-wide expertise on regional regeneration, particularly regarding coastal towns and the ‘levelling up’ agenda. “We have worked with local councils to deliver training, supporting regeneration in the ‘new normal’ and are developing consortiums across the region through our leadership of the Arts and Humanities-focused Coastal Creative Network,” said Nicky. “We have established connections with many local authorities and are developing these collaborations to unlock place-based funding that would be especially significant in areas with low higher education engagement and marked social deprivation.”

Project incubation SIAH has supported knowledge exchange and enterprise projects in a multitude of areas. Nicky said: “We supported policy projects on the relationship between heritage and wellbeing in the aftermath of the pandemic and on COVID, obesity and poverty in public health and government communication.” SIAH is also working on literacy and the creative industries in the region, supporting enterprise projects on the digital creative industries and developing online language courses in refreshing our e-language licensing.

The next 12 months Outlining the coming year, Nicky said: ‘We are going to develop our cross-University work on enterprise and research. This includes a cross-faculty event on the Environmental Humanities, contributing to interdisciplinary events on the importance of narrative and storytelling and supporting cultural strategies for coastal towns.”

An upcoming highlight is a Public Life/ Personal Research series SIAH is hosting. Public Life is conversations with high-profile speakers such as Gayatri Spivak, Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and Amercian author Shoshona Zuboff, which will explore ‘public life’: an ideal newly contested by the electronic capture of the commons, the removal of boundaries between work and home, the policing of public spaces and the onslaught of the culture wars. Personal Research is a series of themed workshops which will understand the post-COVID contexts for research. Watch this space.

Visualising virtual sound sources: Waves of… VR stereoscopic image by Andreea Ogledean