YARN Meet-Up and HELLO Grants

Benefits of the YARN Meet-up

• Obtaining a local and interdisciplinary research network
• Obtaining collaborations in research, knowledge utilization and impact
• Possibility of obtaining seed money of €1.000 

What is the YARN Meet-Up?

YARN organizes yearly thematic meet-ups for all faculty researchers and local professionals/stakeholders to stimulate network-building. The YARN meet-up provides the first step for researchers to form a local network. During these events, organizations are invited to meet researchers and explore possible collaborations in research, knowledge utilization and impact. 

Matches made at the YARN meet-up should be able to work towards their common goal. We offer six Humanities Engage with Local Level Organizations (HELLO) Grants that participants can apply for. This grant provides seed money of €1.000 which can be used for meetings, investigations and activities to explore possible projects and funding. It also can be spent on communication materials for knowledge utilization activities.  

Some examples of successful projects

In 2021, the theme of the YARN meet-up was Culture.

Stargazer Epics: Emerging storytelling in games

This is a collaboration between a game designer (Gerben Grave, Multiverse Narratives) and a researcher in Media Studies (Rik Smit). With the HELLO-grant, we hired a student-assistant to help set up a pilot study focused on how players experience storytelling in games. We had three data-gathering moments (one during the Arts Festival) and are now working on a paper together that will appeal to game designers and researchers alike.

Podcast: The life of Ideas

This is a collaboration between various researchers from the Media Studies department and podcast creator Marjolein Knol. In the podcast, a concept, idea or technology is personified by an actor. The podcast host talks with this concept/actor about itself and discusses questions like “when were you created and why”? The goal is to spread ideas from the humanities in a playful and accessible way.

Language revitalisation through artistic performance 

This project is a collaboration between the Centrum Groninger Taal en Cultuur and a researcher from European languages and cultures/ Minorities and Multilingualism (Aurélie Joubert) and aims at assessing the impact of an artistic performance in Gronings on the audience. At a time when the influence of international music (mostly in English) is strong, some artists choose to create in a local language. With questionnaires and interviews, we want to explore the public’s perception of cultural productions in streektaal. How do people feel about a performance in Gronings? Is it a more intimate setting? Do they feel more connected to other people? Do songs in Gronings make them happy or do they  think it sounds unusual? How does Gronings culture feel? Can it help them speak more Gronings? We gathered data during a performance at the festival of Arts open day and during a concert in Lewenborg on 13th Oct.

Audio-visual story-telling of the emotional impact of language loss in Europe

Film maker and producer Roeland Dijksterhuis from Studio Bruusk works with a researcher from European languages and cultures/ Minorities and Multilingualism (Aurélie Joubert) to create a documentary which will capture the emotional side of speakers’ experiences with a dying language in and around an old fishing village in the East of the province of Groningen. As society changes, traditional communities adapt and languages are left behind. Linguistic revitalisation work usually aims at producing material and intervening in schools but does not deal much with the emotional attachment of the older speakers that still use a local language that they see disappearing. This collaboration will also raise the question of the interface between research and artistic productions to render life trajectories of speakers who face language loss, to give them a voice and inform further language revitalisation projects. Contacts will be made with speakers through the Visserijmuseum in Termunterzijl which is interested in showing our documentary.