The BBC has announced a major academic research scheme that will inform its future media and technology strategy, partnering with the Arts and Humanities Research Council on eight projects exploring user content, immersive worlds and digital storytelling.
The Knowledge Exchange Project is jointly funded by the BBC's Future Media & Technology department and the ARHC, providing £500,000 for the projects that will enable researchers to collaborate with BBC staff.
Eight proposals were chosen earlier this year and begin in the next few months. All of those focus in some way on viewer and listener engagement, and the development and impact of digital services.
Three projects involved user-generated content, exploring the impact of user-generated content on audiences, large broadcasters and on journalism, social learning through online communities and children's content in a participatory environment.
Two case studies look at the ethics of disseminating material around the miners' strike and another explored how children engage with immersive worlds such as as virtual worlds and games.
The remaining projects examine how older people use digital services, how radio listeners can engage with online tools and the potential impact of digital storytelling on broadcast content.
Researchers at Bristol, Cardiff, Westminster and Manchester Universities have access to BBC intellectual property and will work on the project for 12 months, alongside staff from BBC Children's, BBC Learning and Interactive and BBC Research & Innovation.
For the BBC, this is a way to get valuable academic research into key development areas, while the AHRC says this will be the first in a series of projects to support the creative industries.
"The programme will help ensure that the corporation remains at the cutting edge of collaborative innovation," said Huw Williams, the head of research and Innovation at the BBC, saying it is essential that the corporation "understands the attitudes and motivations" of its audiences.
I suppose £500,000 doesn't seem much money compared with the kind of funding available in the US; the awesome Knight News Challenge had a $25m pot for funding 25 in-depth new journalism projects and in the UK, we can only dream about that kind of funding. But we do have the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford now - which was started with £1.75m in funding from the Reuters Foundation - so maybe this latest squirt of Government-backed funding (from the AHRC side, anyway) is the start of things picking up?
