Cultural Event Information: Early Research into Measuring Culture on the Ground

Abstract

The question of how best to measure culture in a location is intensely debated in the arts sector and in the adjacent disciplines of urban planning and economic policy. Our research examined a wide array of methods of counting culture and discovered a slew of literature on measuring high-level financial, employment, and census statistics in the sector, but found no systematic means of measuring culture at a granular level as it experienced by citizens. Our research hypothesizes that information about cultural events can be aggregated using mixed methodologies to produce a previously-unseen view of culture in a community that may be used in future research to give insight on how culture differs and compares across locations. A pilot project conducted in winter 2012-2013 in Los Angeles tested new methods for identifying sources of cultural event data, aggregating and normalizing them, and evaluating for comprehensiveness, feasibility, consistency, and sustainability.