Know Your Bristol on the Move, a collaborative research project which developed digital tools to help people to explore, research and map the city’s history, heritage and culture – has co-produced several films and animations with digital media company, Calling the Shots, exploring the highlights and challenges of the project.
The collaborative research group included academics from the University of Bristol, Bristol City Council and several local community groups across the city, who worked together to develop digitised historic maps of Bristol, as well as a mobile digital-archiving space that can travel around Bristol to allow others without access to digital technologies to share their stories and add to these resources.
Check out the video below, which explains the Know Your Bristol on the Move research project in a little more detail:
You can also find out more about one of the aspects of the project, called Map Your Bristol in the video below. Map Your Bristol is a history-mapping website and app that was co-developed by University of Bristol Research IT, the Know Your Bristol team and students from St Mary Redcliffe and Temple and St Katherine’s Schools. Anyone can use the site or app to add layers of history to a map of Bristol, including stories, images, audio and video.
Highlights and challenges, animated
As well as the above videos exploring the project in action, there are three insightful animations that explain the purpose of the research project and its community and collaborative techniques such as co-production.
What is Co-production?
As explained by the University of Bristol: “[Co-production] has been a persistent issue for this and for many of the projects funded through the AHRC Connected Communities programme. Co-production can be a slippery concept. This film deals specifically with university-community co-production as practised through the course of Know Your Bristol on the Move.”
“Why maps and why collaboratively produced maps? Surely we could have just employed a professional cartographers to do this for us? At the heart of know Your Bristol on the Move has been a desire to enable people to create their own multi-layered map of the city. Watch the film to find out why.”
“Know Your Bristol on the Move has taken a very different approach to ‘doing history’ than that practised by the vast majority of academic and professional historians. Through real-world events and workshops and via our participatory historical mapping site and mobile app, Map Your Bristol, we invite you to create and map your own histories. Where then is Bristol’s history to be found? Watch the video for some ideas.”
Shona Wright
Shona covers all things editorial at TechSPARK. She publishes news articles, interviews and features about our fantastic tech and digital ecosystem, working with startups and scaleups to spread the word about the cool things they're up to.
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