TORCH and the Pitt Rivers Museum Awarded IT Innovation Funding

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TORCH and the Pitt Rivers Museum have been awarded £60,000 from the IT Innovation Fund to create two mobile apps to share Oxford’s diverse voices, stories, research and collections with members of the University and the public.

Bringing Student Voices into the Pitt Rivers Museum

The first project will enable the Pitt Rivers Museum to unleash student voices within the context of the galleries. Oxford undergraduates and graduates will create alternative interpretations of the collections, asserting new connections between objects and their origins, biographies, use and contemporary significance. These diverse perspectives will be delivered through an app to enrich the visitor experience.

Exploring Diversity Across the City

The second mobile app 'Oxford Alternative Stories' is part of TORCH’s ‘Humanities and Identities’ series for 2017, which brings discussion of issues such as race, gender, and sexuality to the fore. Taking to the city’s streets and buildings, TORCH will work with researchers from a wide-range of disciplines to create an interactive app to reveal diverse stories and their links to Oxford’s buildings, spaces, and places.

Technology and Training

The project will create a content management system to support the production and organisation of compelling mobile optimised content, which will be available on user-friendly apps.  The content will be produced by students and researchers, who will be trained in writing and producing content for mobile and a general public audience.

The apps will be different in their contexts – one will be delivered within the discrete, curated public space of a museum, the other ‘in the wild’ across the city of Oxford - but both apps will bring creative new perspectives to Oxford’s diverse objects and places.

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