Scotland's Creative Industries and the Power of Data: The Story Behind CoSTAR
Professors Melissa Terras and Frauke Zeller join Dr James Cook in conversation as they spotlight the CoSTAR Foresight and Realtime Labs, explore cutting-edge data analysis and virtual production tools, and discuss why the creative industries matter more than ever. The episode highlights how researchers, artists, and technologists are shaping new ways of telling stories. This conversation is part of the Edinburgh College of Art’s Artful Inquiry podcast series.
Posted: 07 August 2025‘It’s our role to open the door to the creative community in Edinburgh. Over the next few years, the Realtime Lab will host a range of collaborations and intersections across the sector. We’ll be running training, experimentation, and exploring how these technologies are transforming production. Edinburgh has an incredibly vibrant creative community, and we want people to be able to get into the studios and experiment. Through that experimentation, they can discover what these technologies can do in ways we might not yet expect and begin to imagine how they want to use them in their own creative work.’
‘CoSTAR is not a typical research project. While it is funded by AHRC, it is fundamentally an applied infrastructure and skills initiative. It brings together research, creative practice, and skills development, enabling us to experiment with new technologies and develop innovative ideas. At the same time, the work we do in the Foresight Lab focuses on understanding how these approaches function in practice. Over the five years of the project, we aim to learn from this experience and generate insights that can support the future development of these areas. Our data analysis focuses on two perspectives: looking inside the labs to understand how the technologies and processes work in practice, and looking outward to the industry to understand how they are experienced, adopted, and valued by practitioners.’