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This report provides a snapshot of the state and needs of creative freelancers in the Edinburgh region in 2022. The last few years have been both interesting and challenging for creative freelancers in Scotland. Given the constraints caused by the Covid pandemic, Brexit, and rising inflation and the cost of living, many freelancers have found themselves having to rethink their practice, strategies and life choices. While this unprecedented period hasn’t yet come to an end, it has highlighted the importance of the creative industries to the creative economy more than ever before. At Creative Edinburgh, we strive to help creative practitioners develop and thrive throughout their journey, and we have done this for over a decade. It is essential for us to understand more about the community that we represent and freelancers play an important role in this large group of creatives. We seek to create a roadmap which will help Creative Edinburgh, but also other sector support agencies, to plan ahead to better support freelancers in the future. Launched by Creative Edinburgh, the largest creative membership organisation in Edinburgh (5400+ members), with support from Creative Informatics, an ambitious research and development programme based in Edinburgh, this report was developed in collaboration with local creative freelance professionals, academic researchers and partnering organisations interested in valuable data relating to the sector, as the activity and growth of the creative sector evolves. Focussed on freelancers and Creative Industry professionals living and working in Scotland, the information collected through this research provides a unique insight into the current status of the local sector, with the effects of Covid-19 and Brexit starting to make an impact. It raises a number of important issues which will be reported to the Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council, Creative Scotland and other stakeholders in view of improving available support and resources. Please note: the CC license for this file applies to thetextof this report only and not to graphic elements which should be regarded as copyright and requiring written permission before any potential onwards publication.&nbsp

Creative Informatics is an ambitious research and development programme based in Edinburgh, which aims to bring the city’s world-class creative industries and tech sector together, providing funding and development opportunities that enable creative individuals and organisations to explore how data can be used to drive ground-breaking new products, businesses and experiences. Creative Informatics is nurturing local talent through five key funding programmes and regular events that support Edinburgh’s creative industries to do inspiring things with data. This work is supported by research into the cluster and emerging data driven creative practices. The Creative Informatics Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Policy & Action Plan (2021-2023) articulates our approach to equality, diversity and inclusion as a publicly funded project operating in Edinburgh and South East Scotland. Our approach is framed by the community around us, as well as being mindful of both local and global inequalities. We clearly set out how we aim to ensure we are taking an equal and inclusive approach, and include our proposed data publication schema to hold us to account. The document includes our Equality, Diversity, & Inclusion Statement (which is also published on the Creative Informatics website at: https://creativeinformatics.org/creative-informatics-equality-diversity-inclusion-statement/), which summarises our values as a programme in a clear public statement of intent. We welcome feedback on our approach, please email creativeinformatics@ed.ac.uk. We also welcome others to borrow from or develop this policy and action plan for their own organisations and have thus made the document available under open license here., Please note that we will be regularly revisiting and updating this document and would recommend ensuring you are always referring to the most recent version by bookmarking or referencing the "Cite all versions" DOI.

Creative Informatics is a research and development programme based in Edinburgh, which aims to bring the city’s world-class creative industries and tech sector together. We are a collaboration between University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University, Creative Edinburgh and CodeBase. The Creative Informatics programme is in part funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Projects funded by the AHRC and other UKRI funding bodies are required to submit Data Management Plans that describe the types of data that they will gather and use, and how they will manage this data in line both with current data legislation and with their institution’s data management policies. Because the Creative Informatics programme includes two interrelated but distinct strands of work – the academic research strand and the administrative strand – that at times manage data in different ways, we have chosen to write two separate Data Management Plans, one for each strand. This document comprises the two Data Management Plans that we have submitted to the AHRC and the University of Edinburgh’s Research, Knowledge Exchange and Impact (RKEI) office. We are sharing this document as an exemplar, and in the interests of transparency for all those we work with directly, as collaborators and as research participants. We would like to note that the two Data Management Plans included here are living documents, subject to at least annual review, and may evolve along with legislation changes or changes to the Creative Informatics programme structure. If substantial changes are made to the Data Management Plans in this document, new versions may be published to make those changes transparent. &nbsp

This paper was produced as part of the activities of the Humanities and Data Science Special Interest Group based at The Alan Turing Institute. The group has created the opportunity for fruitful conversations in this area and has brought together voices from a range of different disciplinary backgrounds. This document shows an example of how conversations of this type can benefit and advance computational methods and understandings in and between the humanities and data science, bringing together a diverse community. We believe the Turing can act as a nexus of discussion on humanities and data science research at the national (and international) level, in areas such as education strategy, research best practices, and funding policy, and can promote and encourage research activities in this interdisciplinary area.

Creative Informatics is a research and development programme based in Edinburgh, which aims to bring the city’s world-class creative industries and tech sector together. We are a collaboration between University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University, Creative Edinburgh and CodeBase. We run many events, from meetups and networking, to drop-in sessions and workshops to support applications and funding of various programmes. We don’t do any specific teaching, however many of our sessions are intended to be informative and enable peer collaboration and knowledge exchange. In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have been exploring how to move many of these events online allowing people to join remotely. This guide is initially a way for us to share and think through how to run different kinds of events well, but we’re happy to share this as we know there will be many other projects and organisations facing similar issues. The guide is written in an informal, and practical style: this reflects its many authors, and that it was primarily developed through some focused team meetings to gather experiences, feedback and best practice. For the moment we have been running most meetings and events through Zoom and MS Teams. However, this guide is focused on the practice of how we could run and host online events, rather than the merits of different platforms. This is an evolving, working document, and one we will be updating based on our experiences. We would welcome further suggestions and further input. We should also note that most of this guide was put together in April and May 2020, and so initially this reflects tools and understanding at that time. The first sections address general principles and good practice to consider in running events. The following sections reflect ideas about how to run specific kinds of sessions with audiences that imply different levels of participation, mobility and engagement.

Creative Informatics is an ambitious research and development programme based in Edinburgh, which aims to bring the city’s world-class creative industries and tech sector together, providing funding and development opportunities that enable creative individuals and organisations to explore how data can be used to drive ground-breaking new products, businesses and experiences. Creative Informatics is nurturing local talent through five key funding programmes and regular events that support Edinburgh’s creative industries to do inspiring things with data. This work is supported by research into the cluster and emerging data driven creative practices. The Creative Informatics Ethics Statement has been created to capture the programme’s position on the values and priorities for the work we undertake and support, and forms part of our work to encourage best practices and thoughtful reflection on work with data and new technologies in the creative industries. This statement provides guidance for those working in and around the creative industries, or with data more broadly in a creative context, and should be used as a tool for reflection with prompts to consider, document, and review approaches and practices, and as a way to encourage positive engagement with legal and societal responsibilities. The authors are publishing this work openly as we enthusiastically welcome reuse and remixing of the Creative Informatics Ethics Statement and welcome questions or comments that may feed into future iterations and best practices., Creative Informatics is a partnership between The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University, Creative Edinburgh and Codebase. Creative Informatics is funded by: the Creative Industries Clusters Programme managed by the Arts & Humanities Research Council as part of the Industrial Strategy; the Scottish Funding Council; and the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal Data Driven Innovation Initiative.

The Reference Rot in theses: a HiberActive pilot is a short University of Edinburgh-funded project to explore how the principles of using “Hiberlinks” in scholarly work can be applied in practice. We are working to develop practical tools to support PhD students ensure that when they cite a URL in their thesis (or in chapters, associated publications, etc.) it remains valid and useful rather than suffering from “Reference Rot”. The project builds on the EDINA and Los Alamos Hiberlink research (as presented at Repository Fringe 2010; Open Repositories 2012) which highlighted the issues of Reference Rot and the potential use of “decorated” URLs to ensure original and time stamped archives of web materials are cited in one place. Now, working with postgraduate intern researchers, we have been exploring the needs of PhD students across the University of Edinburgh to better understand how much they think about the persistence of web materials – particularly once they complete and deposit their thesis, and what kind of information and support they require to use Hiberlinks in their own work. We are also working with local colleagues working with repositories and theses to understand how best to integrate these approaches in the pre/deposit stages. In this short 10x10 we will share an overview of our work and share some of our findings and the pilot tools we have created. We think this work has huge potential and welcome feedback and further discussion after the presentation and will provide links to the pilot tools for further explorations.

This paper introduces current research taking place at the University of Edinburgh, which examines students’ use of social media and how they manage their digital footprint. The work engages all student cohorts (undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD, and including online students) and aligns with the innovative cross-University 'Digital Footprint' campaign (2014-2015) in order to conduct a systematic programme of research aimed at building our institutional and sectoral understanding of how students are managing their digital footprints, where such management is lacking, and what this might mean for future institutional planning to build student competence in this area.This paper will outline the rationale for this work, including theoretical and practical contexts and challenges associated with running a digital footprint (social media awareness) campaign on this scale, as well as providing some initial insights arising from activities to date. It will also look ahead to ongoing and future activities, including further research work and a planned impact analysis of the social media awareness campaign.The “Managing your digital footprint” campaign is a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh Institute for Academic Development (IAD), EDINA, Student Information Portals, Information Services, Careers Service, and the Edinburgh University Student Association. The research is funded under the University of Edinburgh Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme and is being led by researchers from the IAD, the Moray House School of Education and EDINA. It is anticipated that research findings for this project will feed into University of Edinburgh policy, provide evidence-based guidance to colleagues with responsibility for embedding digital social media in learning and teaching, provide evidence to enable support services to meet students’ needs and use of social media, and give a rich picture of the current 'state of play' among our diverse student body which will be useful equally for students and staff of the University.

Scholars interested in nineteenth-century global economic history face a voluminous historical record. Conventional approaches to primary source research on the economic and environmental implications of globalised commodity flows typically restrict researchers to specific locations or a small handful of commodities. By taking advantage of cutting-edge computational tools, the project was able to address much larger data sets for historical research, and thereby provides historians with the means to develop new data-driven research questions. In particular, this project has demonstrated that text mining techniques applied to tens of thousands of documents about nineteenth-century commodity trading can yield a novel understanding of how economic forces connected distant places all over the globe and how efforts to generate wealth from natural resources impacted on local environments.The large-scale findings that result from the application of these new methodologies would be barely feasible using conventional research methods. Moreover, the project vividly demonstrates how the digital humanities can benefit from trans-disciplinary collaboration between humanists, computational linguists and information visualisation experts. Important facets of this project include:· After considerable difficulty and lengthy negotiations, we acquired significantly more historical documents than we originally expected. The full corpus exceeds 7 billion word tokens, which is very big data by humanist standards.· Lexicon creation proved to be one of the most challenging and interesting aspects of the project, requiring interdisciplinary skills in archival research, linked data, text mining and knowledge of the historical context.· The project has identified almost 2,000 commodities that were regularly traded in the nineteenth century, two orders of magnitude more than are standardly studied by historians.· Historical sources that have undergone Optical Character Recognition (OCR) are challenging to process and this, in combination with the particular questions asked by historians, required the text mining team to develop new approaches and new text processing tools for the project.· The geospatial nature of the data lent itself well to an interactive visualisation that displays commodities in relation to locations on a world map. The same commodities can also be visualised on a timeline to show how trading evolved over the nineteenth century.· The relational database and visualisation software is well advanced and ready for use in historical research. The database can by used by historians for unguided research aimed at developing new research questions and identifying crucial primary source texts related to a specific commodity

This report provides a snapshot of what the Creative Informatics partnership has achieved over the last two years (Nov 2018-June 2021), as we reach the midway point of our funding period (2018-2023). Creative Informatics (https://creativeinformatics.org/) is part of the Creative Industries Clusters Programme; a UK wide initiative designed to drive innovation, growth, and sustainability in the Creative Industries, through a first of-its-kind research and development investment of £80m by the UK government. With a focus on Edinburgh and South East Scotland, Creative Informatics is working to drive growth and sustainability in this region’s world class creative industries by supporting creative individuals and organisations to do inspiring things with data. The programme is led by the University of Edinburgh and is delivered in partnership with Edinburgh Napier University, CodeBase and Creative Edinburgh. Please note: the CC license for this file applies to thetextof this report only and not to graphic elements which should be regarded as copyright and requiring written permission before any potential onwards publication.&nbsp

This report provides a snapshot of what the Creative Informatics partnership has achieved over the last two years (Nov 2018-June 2021), as we reach the midway point of our funding period (2018-2023). Creative Informatics (https://creativeinformatics.org/) is part of the Creative Industries Clusters Programme; a UK wide initiative designed to drive innovation, growth, and sustainability in the Creative Industries, through a first of-its-kind research and development investment of £80m by the UK government. With a focus on Edinburgh and South East Scotland, Creative Informatics is working to drive growth and sustainability in this region’s world class creative industries by supporting creative individuals and organisations to do inspiring things with data. The programme is led by the University of Edinburgh and is delivered in partnership with Edinburgh Napier University, CodeBase and Creative Edinburgh. Please note: the CC license for this file applies to thetextof this report only and not to graphic elements which should be regarded as copyright and requiring written permission before any potential onwards publication.&nbsp

Creative Informatics is a research and development programme that supports work across Edinburgh’s Creative Industries engaging with Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) - a cornerstone of the UK’s industrial strategy for growth in the digital economy. This 5-year project supports a vast array of individuals and projects in the Creative Industries in engaging with DDI, through offering them funding and access to upskilling initiatives. The programme includes providing monetary support for individuals and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) as ‘Resident Entrepreneurs’ – to develop new data-driven services and products; ‘Challenge Projects’ -– where creative and cultural organisations present challenges in need of a data-driven or digital solution; and Connected Innovators – an opportunity to support emerging leaders to advance their careers and businesses through data-driven innovation. Over its five year lifespan, Creative Informatics plans to fund more than 100 projects that engage with real world challenges in the Creative Industries. Projects can span multiple contexts and disciplines – all of the Creative Industries and all manner of digital technology; some last only 3 months, others can take up to 2 years; some will succeed and rapidly gain external investment, others will quickly pivot away from their original ideas, or will not be taken any further after the funding period. This presents a vast and demanding opportunity for academic research. As researchers, we sought a way to make sense of this varied array through a process of cataloguing the funded projects. Focussed on projects funded and initiated in the first two years of the Creative Informatics cluster, we have systematically catalogued 44 of the projects that Creative Informatics has funded, based on their initial (and extensive) funding applications.

Creative Informatics is an ambitious research and development programme based in Edinburgh, which aims to bring the city’s world-class creative industries and tech sector together, providing funding and development opportunities that enable creative individuals and organisations to explore how data can be used to drive ground-breaking new products, businesses and experiences. Creative Informatics is nurturing local talent through five key funding programmes and regular events that support Edinburgh’s creative industries to do inspiring things with data. This work is supported by research into the cluster and emerging data driven creative practices. The Creative Informatics Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Policy & Action Plan (2021-2023) articulates our approach to equality, diversity and inclusion as a publicly funded project operating in Edinburgh and South East Scotland. Our approach is framed by the community around us, as well as being mindful of both local and global inequalities. We clearly set out how we aim to ensure we are taking anequal and inclusive approach, and include our proposed data publication schema to hold us to account. The document includes our Equality, Diversity, & Inclusion Statement (which is also published on the Creative Informatics website at:https://creativeinformatics.org/creative-informatics-equality-diversity-inclusion-statement/), which summarises our values as a programme in a clear public statement of intent. We welcome feedback on our approach, please email creativeinformatics@ed.ac.uk. We also welcome others to borrow from or develop this policy and action plan for their own organisationsand have thus made the document available under open license here.&nbsp

This report provides a snapshot of what the Creative Informatics partnership has achieved over the last two years (Nov 2018-June 2021), as we reach the midway point of our funding period (2018-2023). Creative Informatics (https://creativeinformatics.org/) is part of the Creative Industries Clusters Programme; a UK wide initiative designed to drive innovation, growth, and sustainability in the Creative Industries, through a first of-its-kind research and development investment of £80m by the UK government. With a focus on Edinburgh and South East Scotland, Creative Informatics is working to drive growth and sustainability in this region’s world class creative industries by supporting creative individuals and organisations to do inspiring things with data. The programme is led by the University of Edinburgh and is delivered in partnership with Edinburgh Napier University, CodeBase and Creative Edinburgh. Please note: the CC license for this file applies to the text of this report only and not to graphic elements which should be regarded as copyright and requiring written permission before any potential onwards publication., Please note that we anticipate several updates to the digital version - please always refer to the latest version. Version 1.3 is the print-ready version. A limited run of printed annual reports will be published in late summer 2021.

Creative Informatics is a research and development programme that supports work across Edinburgh’s Creative Industries engaging with Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) - a cornerstone of the UK’s industrial strategy for growth in the digital economy. This 5-year project supports a vast array of individuals and projects in the Creative Industries in engaging with DDI, through offering them funding and access to upskilling initiatives. The programme includes providing monetary support for individuals and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) as ‘Resident Entrepreneurs’ – to develop new data-driven services and products; ‘Challenge Projects’ -– where creative and cultural organisations present challenges in need of a data-driven or digital solution; and Connected Innovators – an opportunity to support emerging leaders to advance their careers and businesses through data-driven innovation. Over its five year lifespan, Creative Informatics plans to fund more than 100 projects that engage with real world challenges in the Creative Industries. Projects can span multiple contexts and disciplines – all of the Creative Industries and all manner of digital technology; some last only 3 months, others can take up to 2 years; some will succeed and rapidly gain external investment, others will quickly pivot away from their original ideas, or will not be taken any further after the funding period. This presents a vast and demanding opportunity for academic research. As researchers, we sought a way to make sense of this varied array through a process of cataloguing the funded projects. Focussed on projects funded and initiated in the first two years of the Creative Informatics cluster, we have systematically catalogued 44 of the projects that Creative Informatics has funded, based on their initial (and extensive) funding applications.

This report provides a snapshot of what the Creative Informatics partnership has achieved over the last two years (Nov 2018-June 2021), as we reach the midway point of our funding period (2018-2023). Creative Informatics (https://creativeinformatics.org/) is part of the Creative Industries Clusters Programme; a UK wide initiative designed to drive innovation, growth, and sustainability in the Creative Industries, through a first of-its-kind research and development investment of £80m by the UK government. With a focus on Edinburgh and South East Scotland, Creative Informatics is working to drive growth and sustainability in this region’s world class creative industries by supporting creative individuals and organisations to do inspiring things with data. The programme is led by the University of Edinburgh and is delivered in partnership with Edinburgh Napier University, CodeBase and Creative Edinburgh. Please note: the CC license for this file applies to thetextof this report only and not to graphic elements which should be regarded as copyright and requiring written permission before any potential onwards publication.&nbsp