Applications open TODAY for individuals and SMEs that have the skills to propose data-driven solutions to two new Creative Informatics Challenge Projects!
We are delighted to announce that our Round 5 Challenge Holders are St Giles’ Cathedral and Leith For Ever! Funding of up to £20,000 is available to successful Challenge Respondents who will retain all or part of the intellectual property for their work, enabling them to commercialise any products or services they produce. Applications for Challenge Respondents are open now and close at 5pm on Monday 2nd August 2021.
The Challenges
St Giles’ Cathedral
Situated in the heart of Edinburgh, St Giles’ Cathedral is both a working church and a 900-year-old heritage site. Pre-Covid, the cathedral welcomed over 1 million visitors a year, with 80% coming from outside of the UK.
Considered the ‘Mother Church’ of World Presbyterianism, St Giles’ is a spiritual centre point for much of the Scottish diaspora and plays a pastoral role for many people with Scottish ancestors who are ‘coming home’.
St Giles’ challenge is to develop an interactive, visually engaging, accessible interface that will allow physical and online visitors to explore Scotland’s past and their Scottish roots. They hope to be able to provide a search engine based on data from the National Records of Scotland and/or academic databases, enabling visitors to search for their ancestors using a name, profession, or location.
They would like a Challenge Respondent to develop a solution that offers two-way interaction, providing visitors with the information they are looking for, while also collecting visitor data to develop an interactive visualisation that demonstrates the reach of Scotland’s people today.
Leith For Ever
Leith For Ever is a community brand created in 2020 by a collective of Leith-based culture and heritage organisations. Their first project was a crowdsourced online campaign to mark the centenary of Leith’s amalgamation into the City of Edinburgh, presenting contributions from local businesses, groups and individuals to connect audiences with grassroots stories and discoveries in the area.
Leith For Ever’s challenge is to help their contributors engage with new and existing audiences and where possible, monetise interactions by encouraging audiences to buy from, tip, or donate to contributors as appropriate.
They would like a Challenge Respondent to develop a platform that provides new ways for their contributors and content to be discovered by audiences and seek an accessible solution that can be used easily by audiences and contributors alike.
Finding a solution to this challenge would enable Leith For Ever to explore new ways of paying creators and managing rights to culture, community and heritage content and creations.
If you have any questions about the Challenge Respondent application process, please contact us at creativeinformatics@ed.ac.uk.