→ Unlike their equals in the business world, cultural institutions and event organizers hardly use solid data to base their daily management and decisions.

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Watch the talk online at 9 a.m. CET, November 25, and click through the slides directly in your browser.

The lack of reliable data on cultural life is also a common problem for researchers. The methods of monitoring cultural activity fail to keep pace with rapidly changing patterns of participation inspired by evolving lifestyles and easy access to digital content (now even more so because of the pandemic).

Why do we still gauge cultural participation using such antique statistical tools as the per capita numbers of library loans or cinema seats?

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In the Medialab study of public transport access to cultural venues we employed a slightly more experimental approach. The data we sourced from a partner institution and our survey was scaled up to include the whole city thanks to the calculations made using Google’s Distance Matrix API.

We were thus led to suspect that cultural participation is related to the accessibility by public transport of cultural venues from various parts of the city.

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