Library Subject Guides
Digital creativity is about using digital tools and technologies to explore creative ideas and new ways of displaying your ideas, research, or work.
The material on this page can be used for inspiration and learning to get you thinking about how to be creative digitally and how to apply these ideas to your own work. We also run training sessions and a week long event in the summer relating to the theme - keep an eye on this page and our training page for more details.
For more on the concept and a summary of what we've done around it, see our Digital Creativity blog post.
There's a range of research happening at York that relates to Digital Creativity. Finding out more about it might help you see how digital creativity can be relevant to your work, discipline, and practices.
If you want to get more digitally creative, we have a range of resources to help you try out new tools and approaches, whether you're a beginner or looking for further inspiration.
Find a range of tools, learning resources, and inspiration on our Digital Creativity Tools site.
How do we tell stories using digital tools?
View full slides on Google Slides
One kind of digital storytelling is round telling stories in an interactive way, whether through games or interactive narratives. Our Interactive stories and games Skills Guide is one place to start thinking about if you could communicate something in a more interactive way.
Need to communicate your data in interesting and creative ways? Want to know the possibilities beyond a list of data and statistics? Here we look at the principles of data visualisation from the spreadsheet to the work of art.
Being able to write code and program a computer is a skill that gets ever more useful in our digitally focused world. There's a wealth of creative opportunities - from creating an app to making art - that can be done with some coding knowledge. We look at different programming languages and how to get started.
Editing images, sound and video in creative ways is a great way to remix and rework existing material and create exciting digital artefacts. We have guides on how to work with images and audio using digital editing tools.
You can make elaborate creations using the most basic tools. Here's a few we prepared earlier:
And one that was a bit more involved:
Maybe you need to get in the creative mood, or just try something a bit different. Creative activities and prompts are a common way to try out things, play around, and be creative without the need to start from scratch.
Take Three Nouns - generates three nouns for you to do whatever you want with
Idea Lottery - A grid of words for you to try and connect together (see what narratives come out of it)
Random Digital Creativity Generator - More focused on looking for inspiration and exploring particular tools, this gives you random examples of creative work and tools you could use to play around with
Cut up text - take a printed text (preferably a photocopy or print out!), cut it up, and rearrange. You can do it digitally using a free image editing tool like Pixlr and it can be a great way to rethink texts you know well.
Quickfire ideas - fold a piece of paper into eight, then give yourself a minute per section to doodle an idea
For Digital Creativity Week 2019, a group of students came together to learn a range of new tools, explore archival material and data relating to Yorkshire at York Minster Library and the Borthwick Institute for Archives, and create an exhibition around the library. See our Digital Creativity Site for more on what they got up to.
They created a wide range of final outputs that were displayed around the library. See images and interact with some of their work on the final creations page
The video below shows the digital output created by a group of students during our Digital Creativity Week 2018. To find out more, see our Digital Creativity site.
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