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In the spring of 2011, the UK's Digital Curation Centre (DCC) commenced a programme of outreach designed to assist individual universities in their development of aptitude for managing research data. This paper describes the approaches taken, covering the context in which these institutional engagements have been discharged and examining the aims, methodology and processes employed. It also explores what has worked and why, as well as the pitfalls encountered, including example outcomes and identifiable or predicted impact. Observing how the research data landscape is constantly undergoing change, the paper concludes with an indication of the steps being taken to refit the DCC institutional engagement to the evolving needs of higher education.International Journal of Digital Curation (2013), 8(2), 181-193. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v8i2.282The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. The IJDC is published by UKOLN at the University of Bath and is a publication of the Digital Curation Centre.

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As a crowd they lie there; as a crowd they rise again.' Elias Canetti.This chapter is concerned with the meanings of northernness in English culture. I understand northernness to represent a complex set of interrelated ideas about the working class and history which I intend to explore in two key recent manifestations: the Mitchell and Kenyon 'factory gate' films and the rehabilitation of the work of L.S. Lowry in the 2013 Tate Britain Lowry exhibition curated by T.J. Clark and Anne M. Wagner (Lowry and the Painting of the Modern Life) (Clark and Wagner 2013). As Tom Gunning has argued in his essay on the Mitchell and Kenyon factory gate genre, 'Pictures of Crowd Splendor', these films represented the emergence of the working class 'onto a new stage of visibility' (Gunning 2004: 49). However, counterbalancing the excitement of this appearance (then and now),there is a qualified nostalgia in Gunning's account for a working class as it was once conceptualized in historical materialism. For instance, he talks of the working class as being 'putatively the driving force of any age' (ibid.: 49). It is the combination of emergence and promise, followed by disappearance and defeat, a combination summed up by Gunning in the idea of the once 'imaged and promised' but now 'forgotten futures' of early cinema, that has become such an established part of representation of the industrial 'North' (ibid.: 58).Nevertheless, I will argue that at the same time the Mitchell and Kenyon films help to reintroduce 'the openness of the future into the past' and thereby interrupt the solidity of that 'North' (Zizek 2013: xviii). Stored unseen and forgotten in a Blackburn cellar for most of the twentieth century, evidence of an 'early' cinema which disappeared before World War I, the fate of the films, their belonging to a chancy, hopeful 'lost and found narrative' allows us to review the utopian energies released by what was perhaps the encounter of cultural modernity: the working masses with the cinematograph. In their miraculous rendezvous with our present the films allow us to reflect on some of the continuing pressures of class ideology which their original public manifestation broke through. Something was going on here -I

He views this contemporary 'New Realism' as a liberation from the confining narrowness of 'socio-political didacticism' (Forrest 2010: 31). In this way, British social realism joins a global realist cinema of auteurs. Most commentators agree with Forrest that British social realism has changed, becoming more aesthetically self-conscious and less engaged with what Forrest refers to as 'leftist propaganda' (Forrest, 2013, 3). However, for some, these changes are far from positive ones. Clive Nwonka, for instance, sees this New Realism as decontextualized, de-politicised, sentimentalised naturalism that reproduces character studies of the working class-individualising and moralising its subjects and isolating the predicaments of their lives from causal, determining socioeconomic structures (Nwonka 2014). He has in mind critically feted recent films such as Clio Barnard's The Selfish Giant (2013) and Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (2009). In particular, Nwonka takes these directors to task for focusing on intra-class conflict as opposed to inter-class struggle or the 'antagonistic relationship of the social structure and the protagonists that determines their life choice and behaviour' (215). Whilst I sympathise with Nwonka's advocacy of a politically motivated social realist aesthetic focused on 'the possibility of struggle and change', there nevertheless may well be conjunctural reasons for what he sees as lamentable aesthetic departures from his preferred Lukascian realism with its dramatisation of the contradictions based in social relations (216). Despite Nwonka's scepticism, there may be other, more positive ways we might understand the cultural politics of New Realism. For instance, I have argued elsewhere that some of the filmmakers covered approvingly by Forrest are no less engaged than Loach with the political consequences of the determining socioeconomic forces of neoliberalism (Dave 2011). But at the same time it seems probable that my own interest in the representation of internal working class conflicts and the difficulty currently in regrounding a working class 'common culture', would for Nwonka, concede too much to what he sees as a social realist cinema beset with depoliticising and decontextualizing forces. Despite the differences between Forrest and Nwonka, both make assumptions about the 'social' in social realism that are either insufficiently historicised and/or politicised. For Forrest, the social is often reified as that which remains unchanging or constant (what he refers to as 'traditional thematic concerns') whilst it is aesthetic strategies that shift and are alive (responding to expressive techniques of art cinema) (Forrest, 2010, 32). This forestalls the need to simultaneously consider the nature and extent of the changes in social relationships under neoliberalism alongside the fine grain of the relationship of the Formatted: Not Highlight