Page 121 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015121tion investments on those activities that create higher public value.d) Building new data products, services and experiences: Finally, data can provide the foundation for new products, services and experiences in the Arts and Cultural sector. By this I mean three things:1. There are many opportunities to develop personalised platforms and services for Arts and Culture lovers. Going beyond well known examples in video and music, such as Netflix or Spotify, both of which analyse their data exhaustively to optimise the user experience and, in the case of Netflix, even use audience engagement data to identify new project ideas to develop,47 there are also arts-oriented platforms such as Artfinder,48 an e-commerce site where users can buy artworks from thousands of independent artists. Like many other e-commerce sites, Artfinder includes collaborative filtering techniques to help its users discover artists they might like based on the behaviour of other users similar to them.2. Arts and Cultural organisations are creatively incorporating data into the artworks, events and exhibitions that they commission. This makes sense, given the central position of data in modern culture. Some examplesof works that use data as an arts material include Ryoji Ikeda’s49 audiovisual installa- tions, or Stefanie Posavec’s50 visualisations of literary data. The Open Data Institute51 (a UK based body with the mission to help other organisations unlock value from open data) has a “data as culture”52 programme toexhibit and commission works of art based on data. Barcelona’s CCCB53 recent “Big Bang Data”54 exhibition acted as a forumto discuss the cultural implications of the data revolution. In addition to providing a foundation for new art, data is also acting as a tool to encourage audience interaction in Arts and Cultural events and performances. One example of this is Lightwave,55 a start-up that is developing a wristband that monitors the behaviour of audiences at cul- tural events in real time, allowing performers to react to this information immediately, and even projecting visualisations of this data back at the audience.3. Arts and Cultural organisations can also make their data openly available as another avenue to create public value. OpenGLAM56 (Open Galleries, Libraries and Museums)is an initiative coordinated by the Open Knowledge Foundation57 to encourage Arts and Cultural institutions to make their datasets and content openly available. It includes, for example, 111,000 objects and their metadata from the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum.58Making it happen: some policy and practical implicationsThe previous section provided data and exam- ples of the many different ways in which Arts and Cultural organisations can use the data that they collect to create value. But realising these opportunities will not be easy.Juan Mateos García