Agriculture celebrated with student prize
A Scots technology entrepreneur has put up a five-figure prize fund for digital media content creators at Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University (QMU).
George Mackintosh’s Papple Steading Digital Media Prize competition will support students and recent alumni. Contestants will bet asked with producing engaging digital media content celebrating Lothian and Scotland’s contributions to global agriculture between the 18th and 20th centuries.
The winning works will be displayed at pa pp les tea din g’ s agricultural heritage museum.
Mackintosh bought Papple Steading in East Lothian in 2017. He plans to create an agricultural heritage museum, business destination and community centre.
Mackintosh, who has put up £27,000 for the competition, said: “East Lothian has a wonderful industrial, seafaring and agricultural heritage. The partnership with QMU will bring to digital life the stories of how our agricultural heritage changed the county’s social and physical landscape and how innovators in this part of Scotland had a huge impact on the development of farming and food production around the world.
“The project has extra meaning for me as my father was a farmer and my mother studied at QMU,” he added.
Last June, Eggplant, the software testing firm Mackintosh founded in 2009, was acquired by California-headquartered Keysight Technologies.
Edinburgh-based Mackintosh previously founded 3i-backed audio, video and web conferencing business Geoconference in Glasgow in 1996, with the company being sold to Global Crossing (now Centurylink) in 2000.