Cultural Data: The Intimate Analytics of Digital Collections

This book presents a timely and original study of the meaning, uses, and impact of cultural data today. Working across critical and creative strands of inquiry, the book situates cultural data in the context of contemporary social, environmental, and political challenges such as the future of the arts and climate change.

Drawing on fields ranging from sociology and art history through to computer science and digital heritage, Cultural Data expands the possibilities for the study of arts and culture using computational methods at a critical moment for both national and global discussions about the future of digitisation and cultural data. Combining computer-assisted quantitative research with qualitative and theoretical approaches, this book examines historical trends, demographic politics, and data cultures alongside experimental data visualisations that build distinctive narratives for the arts and creative industries. Through using and manipulating the open-source interoperability of arts and cultural data, the book presents new approaches, both theoretical and empirical, for telling stories about individual artistic careers, events, organisations, and networks. It also explores the unspoken, often hidden or obscured, content of cultural data: its murky histories, gaps, inconsistencies, silences and bias.

This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in fields including cultural heritage studies, creative and performing arts, archival science, cultural policy, gender studies, art history, and cultural theory. It will also be of interest to the growing community of digital humanities laboratories and centres around the globe that operate at the intersection of humanities research, data science and creative practice.

Tyne Daile Sumner is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at The Australian National University.

Nat Cutter is Mary Lugton Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Lecturer in History at The University of Melbourne, Australia.

Rachel Fensham is Principal Fellow of Dance and Theatre Studies at The University of Melbourne, Australia.