The University of Brighton is sharing in £4.6m grants with projects to improve the accessibility of digital film production data and to trace people back through history to medieval times.

British film director Sally Potter’s critically-acclaimed movie, Ginger & Rosa (2012), will be used as a pilot for new tools developed by the research.

The ‘DEEP FILM Access Project (DFAP)’ is one of 21 around the country which aim to make ‘big data’ information more accessible and easier to interpret by the public.

They are being financed through the £4.6m ‘Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities: Big Data Research’ initiative, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council with support from the Economic and Social Research Council.

Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts, announced the new funding today/yesterday  (6 Feb). He said: “Getting quality data out of the hands of a few and into the public domain is an important goal for this Government. This funding will help to overcome the challenge of making vast amounts of rich data more accessible and easier to interpret by a lay audience. These 21 projects promise to come up with innovative long-lasting solutions.”

Dr Sarah Atkinson from the university’s Faculty of Arts will be leading the DEEP FILM project and partner organisations are the National Media Museum, BBC, Screen Archive South East, Adventure Pictures and the University of Southern California’s Large Scale Video Analytics project.

Dr Atkinson said: “Filmmaking as a process recently reached a scale and complexity where a new role has emerged to manage the data generated by the cameras alone – and this has been further complicated by Computer Generated Imagery and shooting in 3D.

“Data generated by the creative process on the logistics and organisation of each shot, on props information and more, is recorded separately from camera data. Currently, the archival systems for all this data contain duplication and opportunities for error; it also makes it impossible to search different kinds of data in an integrated way.

“DFAP will develop an integrated process and framework for the management of all of the assets created by digital feature film production.”

DFAP will be an inter-disciplinary project between arts and computing. Co-investigating for the project will be Dr Roger Evans, a Reader in the university’s School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics.

Dr Evans is heading a University of Brighton team in a second Big Data project, ‘Traces Through Time’, led by The National Archives. It will develop methods and tools to identify and trace individuals across the historical record – back to medieval times. It brings together expertise in historical research, data analysis and statistics with collections spanning over 500 years of British history and will enable the identification of events in the lives of real people.

Dr Evans said: “This builds on our recent successes analysing text in medieval charter documents. Being able to use information buried in text documents as well as structured databases greatly increases the range of evidence about individuals and, in particular, it allows us to go much further back in time, to periods for which organised datasets are not available.”

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