MA Arts Management, Policy and Practice

This course unit provides practice-based, critical knowledge and understanding of digital tools, strategies and practices that are used in both digital humanities research and professional practice in the arts, cultural and heritage sectors. Digital technologies and media content have played an increasingly important role in the creative and cultural sectors, as elsewhere. Digital projects help arts, cultural and heritage organisations to deliver their missions, providing mechanisms for managing resources and collections, and opportunities to engage new audiences in participation and interaction. This has been particularly the case when physical access has not been possible.

You will critically review digital research practices, including film and audio content production, online events and exhibitions, creative evaluation, mapping and consultation with communities. You will be introduced to real world challenges and key professional practices, such as commissioning, designing/developing, facilitating and evaluating creative practice projects. A group project in the 30 credit version applies theory in practice.

(Fieldwork is subject to government guidelines)

To develop students’ theoretical understanding of creative digital media and film practice as a tool and process for social engagement, evaluation and research

To introduce techniques and approaches for producing creative AV content, enabling students to realise a participatory creative media project

To build or consolidate knowledge of technical, practical and critical issues relating to the project management and evaluation of participatory media and digital research practice

To develop transferable skills in commissioning, designing, developing, facilitating and evaluating digital projects.

To engage with a network of professional practitioners in the creative industries through mentoring, project-based interaction and feedback.

Some of the lectures for this unit will be delivered online.

Knowledge and understanding of professional practice and research; including the social, ethical, political and institutional contexts in which commissioning of digital media and content production occurs and their various applications e.g. socially-engaged art practice; exhibition, engagement and event design and delivery; ethnography and ethnographic film-making; commercial media production and broadcast media; public and private creative sectors; data-led community engagement and activism.

To develop understanding through experience of commissioning process, project design, facilitation and evaluation of creative projects.

Identify and evaluate diverse approaches to digital practices and tools and theoretical and critical analysis of their effectiveness.

Demonstrate the application of theoretical and critical concepts, methods and approaches to digital research and production practices and the contexts in which digital projects are commissioned within the creative and cultural sector.

Critically evaluate the role of digital media production in achieving institutional missions and objectives and apply disciplinary knowledge and understanding of institutional policies and practices to creative production proposals.

Respond effectively to objectives set within a professional context through a commissioning process, identifying specific challenges and possible solutions through a project design process

Conduct independent research into a specific challenge in order to produce a creative, analytical solution-based intervention.

Develop and apply skills in a broad range of creative digital production practices with demonstrable applications in the cultural sector.

Prepare and present project proposals, and respond to audience questions and discussions.

Conduct effective creative projects as part of an institutional intervention.

Develop skills in team-based work and project management

Apply practical skills and understanding of working practices, project management and production process to a range of professional settings.

Communicate information and ideas effectively, using appropriate and nuanced language to discuss contemporary challenges in both professional and academic environments.

Display decision-making skills in complex and unpredictable situations

Critically evaluate personal and team performance through monitoring and analytical reflection.

Bonacchi Chiara, Andrew Bevan, Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Daniel Pett & Jennifer Wexler. 2019: ‘Participation in heritage crowdsourcing’, Museum Management and Curatorship, DOI: 10.1080/09647775.2018.1559080

Bouquet, M. (2001) ‘The art of exhibition making as a problem of translation’. In Mary Bouquet (ed.), Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future. New York and Oxford: Berghan, 2001, pp.177-197

Cairo, Alberto. How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Cameron, F. (2003) ‘Digital Futures I: Museum Collections, Digital Technologies, and the Cultural Construction of Knowledge’, Curator, 46, 3, pp. 325-340

Costanza-Chock, Sasha. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. MIT Press, 2020.

Dudley, S. (2012), Encountering a Chinese horse: engaging with the thingness of things. In Dudley (ed.), Museum objects: experiencing the properties of things. London: Routledge, 2012.

Everest, S. (2018), Film and the production of knowledge at the Manchester Museum : a practice-based study. Manchester: University of Manchester.

Grau, Oliver Janina Hoth, Eveline Wandl-Vogt (eds) 2019 Digital Art through the Looking Glass. New strategies for archiving, collecting and preserving in digital humanities. Krems a.d. Donau: Edition Donau-Universität

Haimson, O., Andalibi, N. and Pater, J. (2016) ‘Ethical use of visual social media content in research publications’, Australasian Human Research Ethics Consultancy Services, 20 December. Available at: https://www.ahrecs.com/uncategorized/ethical-use-visual-social-media-content-research-publications (Accessed: 3 April 2017).

Hardman, A. and Everest, S., 'Where Next? for film in the museum: filmmaking as part of creative museum practice at Liverpool’s World Museum' in Journal of Museum Ethnography (March, 2021)

Kinkeldey, Christoph, Alan M. MacEachren, and Jochen Schiewe. “How to Assess Visual Communication of Uncertainty? A Systematic Review of Geospatial Uncertainty Visualisation User Studies.” The Cartographic Journal 51/4 (2014): 372–86.

Krug, Steve. Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (Berkeley, New Riders: 2014).

MacDougall, D. (2006), The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.