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Next steps in transforming cultural sector data



A music gig with pink confetti falling on crowd.

Ben Walmsley and Patrick Towell outline the motivations behind a new scoping project to develop a blueprint for a national cultural data observatory

There is a crisis in cultural data. The national research infrastructure for data in the arts, cultural and heritage (ACH) sectors is incomplete, incoherent and lacks a unifying strategy.

The problem of fragmented and hard-to-compare data matters to us all – not just analysts; it makes it harder to justify and evidence the social and economic impact of cultural activities in a compelling way. This limits investment, hampers innovative policymaking and inhibits collaboration between public and private sectors. It also leaves the ACH sectors vulnerable to public funding cuts, as witnessed in recent announcements by local councils across England, themselves a symptom of a lack of public and therefore political support.

Of course, another major issue with the way ACH data are inconsistently collected, synthesised, managed and interpreted is that it separates the development of public policies and cultural sector strategies from the people and places that should be at the very heart of them.

Labour’s commitment to deeper devolution will bring increased funding and decision-making power to local and regional authorities. This shift has significant implications for research: as policy moves closer to local communities and economies, researchers will need to adapt and rethink established approaches to data collection and analysis. Current ways of working all too often fail to capture people’s lived experiences of arts, culture and heritage.

As the leading political scientist Robert David Putnam argues, civic health and social wellbeing depend on a flourishing cultural and information ecosystem. Yet there is consensus among researchers, policymakers, funders and the sector that cultural data are not fit for purpose.

As policymakers at all levels increasingly focus on culture as a driver for social and economic development and place-based regeneration, this crisis urgently needs to be resolved.

A national cultural observatory

In partnership with our sector specialist partners, The Audience Agency and MyCake, the Centre for Cultural Value is leading a new scoping project to develop a blueprint for a national cultural data observatory for the UK. This observatory would enable the systematic triangulation of complementary datasets to transform the current research infrastructure for public good.

Imagine the cultural, social and economic benefits if we could evidence what most cultural practitioners inherently know to be true: that public engagement with arts, culture and heritage is not only good for the soul but delivers improved health and wellbeing, enhanced education and better work. That it has positive impacts on leisure, retail, enterprise, tourism and even crime.

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) – part of UK Research & Innovation – our project will explore the following key questions:

  1. How can we effectively leverage data services, which combine and analyse multiple datasets, to demonstrate the socio-economic impact of the UK’s arts, culture and heritage sectors?
  2. What challenges and opportunities arise in bringing diverse datasets together? How can these be exploited, mitigated or resolved?
  3. Which human and technological resources are required to deliver the data services necessary to serve the needs of diverse policymakers, funders and sector leaders?
  4. Where there are gaps in the availability of suitable data, who needs to take what actions to fill these gaps?
  5. How can a national cultural data observatory optimally respond to the HM Treasury’s guidance on cost-benefit analysis in policy appraisal and evaluation while incorporating alternative, people-centred methods for evidencing and quantifying value?

Our observatory blueprint will demonstrate the possibilities for data collection, aggregation and analysis. It will incorporate:

  • cultural engagement and participation;
  • cultural infrastructure and activity;
  • the financial, human, tangible and intangible resources on which they depend; and
  • the different dimensions of public value that accrue from these, including social, economic and environmental.

By doing this at unprecedented scale and granularity, our ambition is that the observatory will provide a definitive, defensible and trusted evidence base for ACH sector strategy and public policy more broadly. We also believe that the sector – and those that advise and support it – can use this evidence to support the sector to innovate and grow sustainably.

Our approach

Our project builds on the research undertaken in our previous ESRC project, Making Data Work for Public Sector Policy, which culminated in a call to pilot a national cultural data observatory. It also builds on the roadmap proposed by the Better Data for the Culture Economy report by MyCake and The Audience Agency for DCMS for joining up granular data across the public sector.

This project pursues these calls to action, addressing wider sector interest in what such an observatory might look like, how it could operate, and how it may be used and by whom. It presents an ambitious next step towards a joined-up data infrastructure for the ACH sectors, promising pioneering cross-sector, mixed-methods analysis.

Specifically, we will explore how the mechanisms through which ACH data is collected, synthesised, managed, analysed and interpreted might be improved. In partnership with the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA), we will investigate how datasets could be opened up and linked together in an anonymised, ethical and functional way.

This work will include datasets held by Public Health England, Morrisons, Born in Bradford, The Audience Agency’s Audience Answers cultural engagement platform and MyCake’s non-profit sector financial data to facilitate cross-analysis with Inland Revenue and ONS data, providing fine-grained measures of ACH value. We will experiment with a subset of this data to demonstrate the potential of such analysis and highlight the challenges of carrying out this work on a larger scale.

To illustrate how the observatory would operate, we will design and build a demonstrator prototype observatory for Bradford 2025, the next UK City of Culture. Bradford is an ideal case study for four main reasons: it is the youngest city in Europe; the most diverse city in the UK; it will enable data analysis at hyperlocal, ward, city and regional levels; and via Born in Bradford, it is pioneering innovative evaluation methods and deploying large and varied datasets, including the largest resident cohort study in Europe.

Join us on our journey

Throughout the project, we will engage directly with researchers, sector leaders and with local, regional and national policymakers. This will enable us to foster a more interconnected, people-based and place-centred approach to policy development. We will launch a new research network to build the right consortium to deliver the observatory and convince funders to support it.

Over the next year, we will be hosting a series of roundtables and sector and policy engagement events.

Please sign up to our mailing list if you’d like to get involved and help us transform cultural sector data.

We are grateful for the institutional support and contribution to the direction of the project from colleagues in the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Arts Council England, Historic England, Bradford 2025, Born-in-Bradford, Spirit of 2012, West Yorkshire Combined Authority and the Local Government Association.

Consortium Partner Contacts:

University of Leeds: Ben Walmsley, Dean of Cultural Engagement, b.walmsley@leeds.ac.uk

The Audience Agency: Patrick Towell, Director of Creative Economy, patrick.towell@theaudienceagency.org

MyCake: Sarah Thelwall, Founder/Director, sarah@mycake.org

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