DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

I’m a Senior Research Fellow at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England in Bristol, UK. My practice-led research looks at the intersection between documentary and the Social, Semantic and Open web. I’m investigating the role of the producer as context provider, catalyst, curator in documentary projects. I’m interested in the social, political and cultural potential of participatory and collaborative forms. I reflect my research interests on the CollabDocs blog.

My involvement with DIY and alternative media goes back to the 1970s. I was one of the founders of COW Films, a women's film distribution group, worked with the punk band The Slits and at Four Corners Film Workshop in London's Bethnal Green, and was one of the editors of Emergency Magazine.

I've been working in participatory media since the mid-nineties.  I was co-founder and producer of the BBC's "mass observation" camcorder project - Video Nation (94-2000) and Executive Producer of Capture Wales (2001-2007), a pioneering digital storytelling project in the UK.  I’ve developed and overseen a number of other innovative participatory projects for the BBC including  Voices (2004) – a major pan-platform collaborative exploration of language, accent and dialect across the UK (Webby nominated website ) and  MyScienceFictionLife (2006) (Webby Honoree) - a collective history of British science fiction.

My current practice-based research, The Are you happy? Project revisits Jean Rouch’s seminal documentary “Chronicle of a Summer” in the context of global collaboration and the web, and will be exploring the potential of HTML5 for the “creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson's early definition of documentary).