Streaming public engagement

The Player brings together videos, podcasts and digital exhibitions, which can be accessed by anyone, from anywhere at any time - making the University’s research more accessible to the public than ever before. 

Responding to a digital shift

The University of Sheffield Player was inspired by our public engagement efforts during lockdown, when everyone moved their activities and events online. I watched events and presentations for the first two months, and it was lovely, but I felt the research could be delivered in a more engaging and interesting away. I recognised that we needed to invest in digital here at the University of Sheffield, but we also needed to understand how we would utilise it.

It started in 2020 with the ‘Festival of the Mind’. The festival takes place every two years across Sheffield and sees the brightest minds from the university collaborate with the city’s cultural and creative industries, to help bring their research to life in exciting and entertaining ways. Due to the lockdown of 2020, we had to rapidly invest, understand, and bring in a digital system for the Festival. Now our work was online, but I then realised there was a need for a greater platform with a higher quality of production.

Bridging my worlds of research and production

It's all about the production for me. I'm a producer of live events, so I just moved on to producing online events - but still brought in the talented creatives. Sheffield has some of the country's best creative industries, so why not hire a BBC Radio Four podcaster for your podcast? The Player is a platform for our world-class research, co-produced with artists, musicians, and authors, but the content is the academic research and the presentation/production is what matters.

I spent most of the lockdown watching and listening to content on streaming platforms, but not one did everything I wanted it to. I couldn't locate one that included online downloads, podcasts, live events, and Virtual Reality.  That's what I wanted to create, but I didn't know if it was possible. After putting out tenders and sifting through many company proposals, we selected Joi Polloi - a Sheffield based company who cooked up the official website and mobile app for the The Great British Bake Off! Joi Polloi said yes, it was possible but it would have to be a completely new digital build.       

You can put things on YouTube, Spotify, Podbean, and lots of others, but then you're controlled by their algorithms. Some of our researchers' work could easily be misconstrued in different categories and disciplines. You only have to go on YouTube and look up something that's been put on for research purposes, then look underneath the video playlist and find the algorithm promotes something completely different. After lockdown, I realised how much cookies and preferences influenced what we watched, so I used those characteristics to design the Player.  Audiences want to quickly navigate, so the Player's secret is you're only two clicks away from what you want to watch.

The pandemic provided us all an opportunity to accelerate digital in a way that people could comprehend, because they were living it. You can say you’d prefer to see a live event than watch it online, but if that choice was taken away, you’d get frustrated. The Player came about partly because I wanted to make sure our events had longevity.

A digital legacy    

Digital hasn't replaced live events, but the University wanted our work to have a legacy. I presented it to the University as a financial opportunity that meant we would be repurposing our content and therefore generating money for the institution. The Player can be used for a number of things like student recruitment, marketing, engagement, knowledge exchange, and community access.

Also, on an emotional and personal level, I always want a challenge. The University hosts more than 300 events a year in Sheffield but there's a big world out there. We’ve got all this great stuff, but why is it in Sheffield? Why can't people from all over the world see it? And we’ve now done that. What’s more, we can team up to show events from other festivals, such as Latitude and DocFest. We knew there was a demand and I knew what we were doing was different. The Player is now showcasing our research and engaging communities on a global scale. I want to make sure the platform is a world choice, not just a local one. 

Pathways to impact  

The Player's success can be measured by views or hits, but more crucially it's the impact it has for the research itself, and future funding and support. Academics can use the player to assist them get future research funding.  Academics conduct research in all sectors to benefit society and examine all facets of society's concerns, but we don't always know what those challenges will be. For example, the pandemic demonstrated that scholars who had been undertaking any type of virology work for years and years were suddenly the ones that helped society.

I wanted to build something that would really showcase the world-leading research of my Sheffield colleagues. For early career academics in particular, it has been a fantastic way for them to engage their work with a wider public. 

In some respects, the Player is a window into the great task of being an academic, of tackling all those societal hurdles. So whether it's to help people understand the importance of science or to make people appreciate the beauty of language, It's about real co-production, sometimes you don't know where the artist and the academic end. 

Streaming into the future 

We’ve now launched the Player with academics and my colleagues, and now I want to look further at Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). I want to look how it can expand, I look at the Player like the universe - getting bigger and bigger.  What areas are popular? What areas do we need to present differently? What areas reflect difficult, but important research? There's a lot more interest now in science and technology because we've lived and breathed the consequences of advances in science, health and medicine in the last couple of years. There’s less interest in live events on the Player because now, post pandemic, people will actually go and see something live.

If you get drawn into and inspired by the Player, you might want to go further and read the peer-reviewed articles, or you might want to go straight to the source rather than Google or Wikipedia. The Player leads you straight to the research, it allows you to hear, observe, watch, and demonstrate research in a variety of formats, from a half hour podcast to a five minute documentary. 

I urge all of you to use the Player, expand your mind and explore your curiosity.