Big Data in the arts and culture sector: a mini series

This week I’m going to write a post a day about how Big Data is relevant to the arts and culture sector.

Data seems to be flavour of the month in the cultural sector, with the recent announcement of funding for research into the arts and Big Data, the new Audience Finder service and the increasing volume of words on the subject that seem to be filling up my RSS reader to pick just a handful of examples.

Now, I’m all for evidence-based decision making, but there’s something about the current starry-eyed fascination with Big Data (not to mention the way it looks ominously like wooly marketing/sales-speak) that’s put me off the subject a bit. I’ve voiced some concern about the money that’s been thrown towards it, but happily accept that I don’t know the whole picture. It’s something I want to get my head round and I tend to find that a good way of doing that is to write some blog posts.

Here’s what I’m planning to write about over the course of this week:

• A quick overview of what’s been said so far. I’ve bookmarked some arts/big data articles and resources on Delicious already so feel free to dive in if you want to get a headstart.
• A more in depth look a recent report, Counting What Counts: what big data can do for the cultural sector.
• What I might do if I was running the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts and had money to spend on this.
• A look at what data’s out there already – what can/can’t be counted and what, as far as I’m aware, is/isn’t in fact being counted.

The subjects of the posts are subject to change, by the way, but I wanted to give you a flavour of what to expect.

At the end of the week I’ll do some sort of round-up but if you want to keep up-to-date with everything then subscribe to this blog (RSS isn’t dead, yo) and/or follow me on Twitter.

And please – there are very few experts out there and I’d certainly not hold myself out as being top of the tree. I look up to lots of the people who I know read this blog and I’d be grateful for any insight or experience anyone could add.

Should be fun.