→ Case studies from Medialab Katowice demonstrating how to use digital tools and data science to understand the cultural landscape of the city.

What does the growth of networks, databases or artificial intelligence have to do with the cultural life of the city?

Contrary to endless reports of information overflow we are inundated with, cultural researchers in Poland are not spoiled with too many good quality data sets. As Katowice is no exception in this respect, we decided to apply two, somewhat different strategies to deal with this issue.

In the first case, i.e. the study of public transport access to cultural venues, the data we sourced from Silesian Museum was checked against the findings of our own survey of ~3500 participants. Then the results were scaled up to include the whole city thanks to the calculations made using the Google’s Distance Matrix API.

Our second strategy was to draw data directly from the Web, including Facebook, in order to create a universal database of several dozen thousand cultural events held in Katowice, for which task we relied heavily on the machine learning algorithms, among other things.

At the lecture for Art & Tech Days in Košice I explain the details of both approaches employed during a data-driven study carried out by Medialab Katowice.

» See the lecture » Check the online report