Common Ground: the first national gathering of the AHRC Commons

"The Common Ground gathering will enable ideas and skills to be exchanged, new collaborations to be forged, networks to be enriched, knowledge to be produced, and the value of the arts and humanities to be expressed, discussed, and celebrated."
(AHRC, 2016)

written by Simon Popple and Tom Jackson

We will showcase the new online creative workspace and storytelling resource YARN, allowing participants to document their own projects, record impressions of the event and get creative!

We want to explore the nature of community spaces and the stories that are housed therein. We will also be encourage participants to work with some of our partners, including community archeologists, curators and activists to explore what this means within their own contexts and how they might use the tool for their own work.

Alongside this main showcase, we will also be coordinating a series of participatory activities using the theme ‘The Sense of Space’. These activities will involve visitors creating, sharing and reflecting upon materials that represent the sensory experience of community spaces they inhabit. We will demonstrate how widely available tools can be used to share immersive sensory experiences online, encouraging visitors to develop a heightened sensory awareness.

It was great to be a part of this lively, collaborative event and I would like to thank Professor Andrew Prescott for inviting us to submit a proposal. It presented a great opportunity to network with other academics, discover shared research interests and discuss potential future collaborations. Simon Popple and I generated a lot of interest in the projects we were presenting (the YARN storytelling platform and Experience Temple Works respectively), made some valuable contacts and also helped to 'document' the event by persuading visitors to borrow 360° cameras and share the images and videos they created online.