Digital Creativity: telling new and old stories with technology

It's Libraries Week 2019, and this year's theme is libraries in a digital world. Over the course of the week we'll be doing a few things to celebrate this, including a Digital Creativity Showcase on Wednesday afternoon, and an open lecture on Digital Wellbeing on Wednesday evening. First, to get us in the mood, Siobhan Dunlop explores what it means to be digitally creative...

Historical words for beer drinking in the Yorkshire Historical Dictionary... Virtual reality experiences that show some of the less loved parts of the University of York campus in new lights... The sound of a beating heart. Getting hands on with old records, chapbooks, newspapers, and maps. Art made from code... Completely random things made from code. The ideas of Brian Eno... Cleaning data... The 12 days of Christmas turned into an augmented reality orchestra...

What do these have in common? They’re all things that have come into our digital creativity work, from two week-long events for students to inspiration for new training sessions and standalone showcases.

What is 'digital creativity'?

As we’ve defined it, ‘digital creativity’ is about using digital tools and technologies to explore creative ideas and to find new ways to display ideas, research, and work. In practice, this means trying out innovative tools and different creative approaches not only with digital media, but with data, historical materials, and anything else we can think of!

As an area, research has been done around ‘digital creativity’ as it relates to various aspects of creativity and digital technology. There’s a journal of the same name that proclaims to be ‘at the intersection of the creative arts, design, and digital technologies’ (Aims and scope, Digital Creativity), and the Digital Creativity Labs is a centre for research in games and interactive media. If you search online for ‘digital creativity’, one result is a page on Quora.com that claims the term is ‘outdated’ because ‘all media now digital’.

Maybe most media is now digital in some way, either in its creation or how we interact with and consume it, but ‘digital creativity’ in practice can be a way of focusing on being creative in new and different ways, utilising the power of technology to open up new ways of thinking and new juxtapositions. In turn, this can bring ideas, stories, and research to new audiences, as we found when running our Digital Creativity Week.

What is Digital Creativity Week?

In Information Services at the University of York, we’ve run our Digital Creativity Week twice now. During the week, a group of students work with IT professionals, librarians, and archivists to explore material related to a theme, learn how to use a range of digital tools in workshops, and work together to create final exhibition pieces that relate to both the theme and the digital tools used during the week. Armed not only with laptops and tablets but also notebooks and pens, it is a chance to be creative outside the usual confines of an academic discipline or project.

In 2018, the focus was on the Yorkshire Historical Dictionary data: the students explored the words in the dictionary, learnt about cleaning up the data, and worked with image editing, audio editing, and coding visualisations with Processing to bring certain words and ideas to life. Their final creation was a presentation in the 3Sixty space at York, which projects onto four screens to create an immersive experience. It was combined with augmented reality trigger images that added word definitions and other media to the show. Each student took their own inspiration from different parts of the dictionary to create a section of the presentation, ranging from words linking to war, the home, and the alehouse to a look at immigration to the area. Their final piece can be viewed in a widescreen version below:

In 2019, the week ran again, with more students and a wider theme: Yorkshire. The students visited York Minster Library and the Borthwick Institute for Archives to get hands on with material relating to the region and consider their relation to it. Workshops on audio, images, and coding were interspersed with creative prompts and the chance to try out VR and see live music coding.

This time, the exhibition broke free of a single space and took over the Harry Fairhurst building in the library, where the students created exhibition rooms for attendees to visit and experience their visions of Yorkshire and its past and present. The event contained reflections on the fragility of history and missing data, a look right at the heart of Yorkshire, and pieces considering the continuity of York despite all the change that has taken place. A selection of the final exhibition pieces can be viewed on our Digital Creativity site.

How can we all be digitally creative?

Digital creativity isn’t something confined either to week-long events, or to people who work with technology. It is about experimenting with new tools and ideas, combining material in unexpected ways, and finding the digital technologies that can help you be creative or express your creativity. To conclude this post, here are some suggestions for being digitally creative:

1. Try out new free tools. Our site of digital creativity tools might give you inspiration and it has a Random Digital Creativity Generator if you’d like some help starting off (refresh that page for a new set of suggestions).
2. Explore historical material. Part of digital creativity is about working with material and research in new ways, so why not explore the collections discussed on this blog and the Borthwick Institute for Archives blog.
3. Use a notebook. Doesn’t sound very digital, but you shouldn’t doubt the notebook. During Digital Creativity Week each student has a notebook to fill with their ideas, thoughts, doodles, and notes. These can be photographed and digitally manipulated or be used to spark off ideas for soundscapes, videos, and more.
4. Fail better. Remove any expectations of what you must create and instead aim for something that is completely new to you, even if it’s not what you intended to make. Try out glitch tools to embrace the bizarre or give yourself arbitrary constraints on your piece to see which direction that sends you in.
5. Have fun. You don’t have to set out to create something beautiful or learn a new skill. You never know what you might do with a spare 5 minutes!

If you're interested in finding out more, or getting a little more inspiration, feel free to drop in on our Digital Creativity Showcase in LFA/144 (Fairhurst first floor), from 14:30-16:00 on Wednesday 9th October.