Telling stories of the city using digital and data

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University of Nottingham > City as Lab > Challenge themes > Telling stories of the city using digital and data

City as Lab will run a 7-month programme from January to July 2025 to support engagement with collaborators and partners around an identified challenge where the outcome of your activity could be conceived as shining alight on an untold or hidden ‘story’ about the Nottingham city region. The goal for City as Lab is to draw on data to surface and harness diverse untold stories that shape understanding of the city region and enact positive change for people, places and policymakers in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire

Be able to apply for HEIF funding to enable knowledge exchange and collaborative activities, partnership development and public engagement (from £300-£3K) – e.g. equipment, event costs, PDRA time
Be part of an interdisciplinary community developing place-based approaches using digital/data interventions
Have access to City as Lab project space and award-winning digital resources and capabilities on the University’s city-based Castle Meadow Campus (for activities such as ideation, partner engagement, showcasing and exhibition).

There are two potential routes to involvement:

You already have data about the Nottingham city region that relates to a challenge area that you would like to find ways to communicate or share with a particular community (challenge areas could include examples such as health and wellbeing, environment and sustainability, cultural and community life, lived experience, inclusive growth, mobility, improving the lives of young people etc). You may be seeking to find ways of involving a particular stakeholder group for instance. This sharing could be via workshops and engagement events and/or it could be through the development of digital assets or visual materials that support the wider communication and broader stakeholder engagement as an important step in knowledge exchange or to support a specific impact initiative. Projects will need to define a specific output format as part of their proposal.

You would like to engage with a specific community group to generate new data to support a particular city-based untold or hidden story and challenge question (the scope of this is wide so do interpret both ‘data’ and ‘challenge’ broadly!). This engagement could the take the form of workshops, events, consultation activities, focus groups, creative activities etc (the only limit here is your imagination and your preferred methods) and/or it could be through the development of new creative outcomes that illustrate this new data, as above. For instance, an activity that involves a community group in the development of creative materials related to a particular research and knowledge exchange concern (health and wellbeing, environment and sustainability, cultural and community life, lived experience, inclusive growth, mobility, improving the lives of young people etc)