Responding to the urgency of activist movements and governmental talks to prevent climate change, screen sector practitioners are, at present, seeking solutions to the environmental harms caused by film production. For example, events run by the British Film Institute and Creative Scotland have discussed how the sector can become greener. However, as attested by Albert, BAFTA's industry-leading sustainability consultancy, industry initiatives to date have focused on carbon-offsetting on film shoots. While many filmmakers hope to achieve carbon neutrality, researchers and activists argue that 'net-zero' masks the effects of prolonged carbon use and fails to prevent climate change. This project, then, will turn attention to the hidden environmental impacts of prop and costume making, and provide practitioners with tools to help them reduce carbon emissions. In doing so, the project will collaborate with Albert to provide four sustainability calculators, each of which will estimate the carbon emissions produced by an object made for the Star Wars franchise. The calculators will also enable practitioners to input data to determine the sustainability of their past or future productions. The four case studies underpinning the calculators are: 1. Analogue (1980) and digital (2005) iterations of the droid Artoo Detoo 2. Queen Amidala's 'throne room' costume in The Phantom Menace (1999) 3. Stormtrooper helmets appearing across multiple films 4. An animatronic porg from The Last Jedi (2017). Star Wars is a useful point of departure in discussions about sustainability. For, from its inception to the present day, it has told stories about environmental change. In A New Hope (1977), a human-made weapon obliterates the planet Alderaan. The Phantom Menace addresses the effects of colonisation. And in Solo (2018), characters recognise the effects of war on different eco-systems. Emerging in the 1970s alongside the first mainstream public debates about climate change and other environmental issues, the Star Wars franchise has provided fascinating commentary on how humans change the natural world. Of course, planetary exploitation is not limited to its onscreen narratives. It can also be evidenced in the production and commoditising of Star Wars properties, which are all made from raw materials: stormtrooper helmets rely on thermoplastics derived from oil; silicon computer chips store digital characters. Through its extractive, manufacturing, and waste processes, the franchise harms ecosystems and contributes to global climate change by emitting carbon, among other pollutants. Yet many of the franchise's innovations in prop and costume making, which have emerged from English studios, have set standards across the sector for over four decades. Visually iconic Star Wars properties appear in fashion magazines (Vogue, 1977, 2002), are referenced by other media such as television shows (Ru Paul's Drag Race UK, 2021), and are crucial to Star Wars merchandising. Thus, the franchise will offer valuable insights into the environmental impact of prop and costume making that are relevant to the film industry and other design-oriented sectors. The project's findings and resources will be shared on a website, which will include written histories, short videos, and visual material. Furthermore, through a research network, industry focus group, and events (such as a lecture at the National Science and Media Museum's 'Widescreen Weekend' Film Festival), the project will prompt discussions about sustainability among academics, practitioners, and the public. The Environmental Impact of Filmmaking project, then, will demonstrate how props and costume making are vital to industry efforts to make filmmaking more sustainable. By equipping practitioners with tools to adopt greener processes and inspiring public conversations about industry practices, the project will have a lasting and positive impact on film production.

SMASHfestUK seek Nucleus award funding for the purposes of developing a physical science specific, immersive theatrical experience for the purposes of ultra-deep engagement with STFC scientists, research and facilities. "Space Plague" is aimed at engaging, young people and their families, and will be specifically focussed on working with culturally diverse socially-economically disadvantaged communities in London and Bradford initially. SMASHfestUK has previously developed disaster-based and narrative-lead STEM festivals over 4 years, which have been very successful in reaching disadvantaged and under-represented audiences and attracting audiences who are 60-70% BME and up to 80% fifth quintile POLAR postcodes (most deprived). Some of this work has been funded and supported by previous STFC Spark awards, providing learnings which we are basing this application on. Evaluation evidence suggest strongly that the disaster-themed narrative angle of the festival is a very successful way of engaging young people, particularly those who do not normally engage with science. The festival format however, makes it very resource-heavy, limiting the ability of the festival to travel and reach wider audiences effectively and the level of engagement with specific research can be variable, depending on factors such as volunteers knowledge. "Space Plague" will be an interactive experience which will use methodologies developed from immersive theatre, escape rooms and existing SMASHfestUK interactive installations to create a fully immersive production in which audiences will take part in a performance, carrying out experiments, solving clues and finding solutions to problems that threaten the future of humankind. Although fictional, the storyline will be based on real, (possible) events and the solutions will come through engagement (within the narrative) with STFC researchers and facilities. We will partner with researchers and facilities to develop the story and script. A single "performance" lasting around 60 minutes will process 60 visitors who will experience 3 linked storylines, (each with its own interactive scientific elements) in which visitors help prevent a coming disaster. It is envisaged that the performance will form a central experience at Science festivals (repeated multiple times daily), and that real scientists will feature as live characters in the stories (semi-fictionalised). We will also create filmed assets with the researchers and the research facilities so that it can be toured around more rural areas and also into schools on smaller budgets, if individuals are unable to participate live. In this way we will create an activity which can be enjoyed with a full "cast" featuring live scientists and actors at large events such as festivals, but can also be customised for touring to schools or rural areas in a more resource friendly manner, extending the life-span and audience reach of the piece. We seek funding to develop and deliver the specific storyline for the first iteration of Space Plague - the core of the story - which will form a standalone performance/experience. We envisage that other storylines could be attached to it in the future to create sequels and new "episodes". In this sense we intend to create a production which is customisable, scaleable and can be distributed and experienced in different ways depending on the available resources. Although the title of the piece is Plague, these modules specifically revolve around real STFC funded research and facilities in the UK. The performances will be piloted, developed and performed across 3 festivals, Bradford Science Festival (2019 and 20) and SMASHfestUK (Deptford) in 2020.

Did Britain and the BBC undergo a 'cultural revolution' in the 1960s? Did the BBC in the sixties fulfil its declared ambition 'to be ahead of public opinion' in its coverage of social change, laying the foundations for its current initiatives on diversity and inclusion? How does the BBC's treatment of women and BAME and LGBTQ+ communities in the 1960s appear to members of the same groups in 2022? The BBC's centenary year provides an opportunity to explore the intertwined histories of the BBC and modern Britain by focusing on the decade popularly thought to have marked a turning point for both broadcaster and nation. This project will create a people's history of the BBC in the 1960s to complement the institutional history undertaken by the major AHRC-funded project on Connected Histories of the BBC. Schoolchildren will analyse how the BBC reported on race relations, the emergence of gay rights and women's liberation and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Marginalised communities will review how they were represented in 1960s broadcasts and will stage theatrical adaptations of lost documentaries about their communities for which only transcripts survive. A series of talks during LGBTQ+ History Month will explore the BBC's awkward attempts to tackle gay and lesbian live before and after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. A podcast series drawing upon one of the world's largest oral history collections, the BBC-created Millennium Memory Bank, will trace how ordinary people experienced BBC programmes and other aspects of popular culture in the 1960s. Academic and non-academic researchers will come together at a conference on 'The BBC at 100: Past, Present and Future' to share their findings, discover more about the BBC's rich archives and discuss with media professionals how past experiences can inform the future development of broadcasting. These activities will be delivered in partnership with leading organisations in education, heritage and drama: the Historical Association, the OCR examination board, the National Science and Media Museum, the Cinema Museum, the community theatre groups Tamasha, Collective Encounters and Homo Promos and a dramaturg with a distinguished track-record in participatory drama. The activities will be coordinated by a historian of sixties Britain who is experienced in public engagement and who has written widely on popular culture, migration, generation, sexuality, permissiveness, second-wave feminism, national identity and New Social Movements and who is currently writing a history of BBC documentaries about LGBTQ+ issues from the 1950s to the 1980s. The programme will ask participants to decide for themselves whether BBC programmes confirm or contradict my characterisation of sixties Britain as an 'anti-permissive permissive society' in which broadcasts alerted the general public to a liberalisation and diversification of society and culture that most of them opposed.

Study of photography as cultural history is relatively new and under-exploited discipline. It is important because the early history of photography coincides with significant global scientific, industrial, artistic, social, political and economic changes that inform understanding of the spread of scientific ideas, the relationship between science and art, the interplay between new technologies, popular culture and commerce, and the creation of personal and national identities. Access to photohistorical resources is essential for future cross-disciplinary research but these resources are often ephemeral, fragile, widely dispersed, poorly documented and difficult to access, although of enormous scope. Poor and inconsistent levels of documentation make it difficult to assess the significance of material beyond the relatively small nucleus of already well-known and heavily researched artists and scientists. However, image collections are increasingly being published online and search engines are becoming increasingly powerful, creating a timely opportunity to match photographs with other textual sources that can enrich our understanding without travel to numerous archives. De Montfort University has created an extensive corpus of digital resources for researchers of 19th century photography comprising photographic exhibition catalogues and collections of letters. This includes two databases of the earliest known photographic exhibition catalogues: Photographs Exhibited in Britain 1839-1865 (PEIB) http://peib.dmu.ac.uk and Exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society 1870-1915 (ERPS) http://erps.dmu.ac.uk. These combined resources comprise the single most comprehensive record of British photographic exhibitions at this time. But these early exhibition catalogues were often devoid of pictures. A further problem is that amongst the visual arts, photography is unique - multiple versions of the same image can be produced and exhibited simultaneously at diverse locations. Photographs were commonly exhibited/published more than once, at different times, with different titles and even by different people, thus associating a specific exhibition catalogue reference with a specific image published elsewhere can be a complex and involved process. This project will develop and test computer based "finding aids" that will be able to recommend potential matches between historical exhibition catalogue entries and images of photographs in online collections even where there is not a precise match. Incomplete data sets and imprecise information are common problems in arts and humanities research so the results of this research will be widely applicable across a wide range of subjects, allowing researchers to save considerable time and travel in the early stages of their research when identifying material most likely to be of interest to their studies and suggesting possible connections that would not otherwise be easily recognised using conventional research methods. The project outcomes will enable museums, libraries and archives to enhance the value and utility of their collections and of their online services through increased information, improved accuracy and functionality. Within the UK alone over 10,000 galleries, museums and archives could potentially benefit from this research. Within the private sector, beneficiaries will include commercial dealers and auction houses concerned with attribution and value. More accurate identification of artefacts such as photographs can help buyers and sellers and even help to prevent inadvertent export of nationally important treasures. The general public will benefit from improved accuracy and detail of information about objects in museums, libraries and archives, and lay communities of interest such as those carrying out genealogical or local history research will benefit in particular from increased access and awareness of information about historical photographs and related objects.

In recent years, computing and digital media have become an increasingly prominent element of museum collections in the UK and globally. In the UK alone, established heritage institutions such as the National Science and Media Museum (2012) and the Science Museum (2014) have opened new permanent exhibitions about the history of ICT, while new museums of computing have been established in locations such as Bletchley Park (2007) and Cambridge (2014). At the same time, digital heritage has become a key subject of interest to museum-based researchers and practitioners, and computing and digital media a key object for media historians: over the past decade, several foundational histories of these new communication technologies were published, and digital history is now a vibrant, fast-growing scholarly field in its own right. These developments suggest that we are living through a key stage in the formation of both scholarly and public narratives about these new technologies - narratives that will, ultimately, also inform key decisions over what counts as historically significant, and thus what should be preserved and exhibited in museum environments. This offers a perfect moment for a reflective investigation of practices that govern the construction, dissemination and impact of narratives about new technologies, and for the generation of new, collaborative forms of knowledge that will be capable of informing both museum practice and scholarly debates addressing computing as part of historical heritage. To produce this new knowledge, this project will examine the role of museums in constructing narratives about histories of computing through which the past, the present and the future of our societies are imagined and culturally constructed. Rather than adopting a standard scholarly approach that takes museums as objects of study, the project will treat them as equal partners in knowledge generation. Taking up the metaphor of the electronic circuit, where electrical connections between diverse components enable complex operations to be performed, the project will bring together curators from leading museums in the UK (Bletchley Park, the Centre for Computing History, The National Museum of Computing, the National Science and Media Museum, the Science Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum), leading international institutions (the Computer History Museum in the USA, the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation "Miraikan" in Japan, the National Museum of Science and Technology "Leonardo Da Vinci" in Milan, Italy), a company partner (BT Group), and an interdisciplinary team of university-based researchers including PI Simone Natale, co-I Ross Parry and RA Petrina Foti. Leveraging emergent collaborative approaches based on the notion of community of practice, and using the protocols of design thinking and action research methods, the project will carry out a series of practice-led research interventions that will help address three key research questions: RQ1 (TIME): How can museums narrate the development of computers through time? RQ2 (OBJECTS): How can hardware and software artefacts be mobilized by museums to narrate histories of modern computing? RQ3 (DATA): How can museums narrate the role of information and data in computing histories? Trough that, the project will enable transformative impact in the cultural sector, enhancing the capacity of heritage institutions to effectively collect, preserve and present relevant information about the development and societal impact of new technologies. Public engagement will be enhanced by dissemination activities conducted in collaboration with research partners, including a public-facing Research Report co-authored with research partners, which will provide a summary of key project findings and practical recommendations for best practices in the presentation and exhibition of computing heritage.