Towards large-scale Cultural Analytics in the Arts and Humanities

英国拥有世界领先的文化和创意经济，每年都有成千上万的活动、节日、音乐会、戏剧和演出，规模从非常小的、非正式的到大型的、协调的。事件告诉我们很多关于创意领域的信息：然而，尽管已经产生了关于它们的数据，以促进列表和门票销售，但不存在一种服务，研究人员可以通过这种服务访问这些最近产生的商业数据，以便对英国的创意部门进行准确的数据分析和可视化。此外，事件行业创建的数据庞大而复杂，涉及到商业提供商，他们已经围绕数据抓取、收集和传播生成了新颖的业务模型。任何希望使用这些数据的研究人员都必须导航访问数据，同时还要访问大规模的计算，以产生可能用于事件规划，政策或识别潜在趋势或投资和支持机会的新理解。目前特别感兴趣的是收集有关COVID-19大流行对英国活动行业影响的准确信息：尽管存在活动数据，但没有准确的报告利用这些数据来了解大流行的影响和行业复苏。为了提供这样一种可以支持研究人员的数据服务，需要调查如何最好地向艺术与人文学科（A&H）的研究人员提供这些数据，他们中的许多人还没有进行过这种规模的数据分析。因此，需要与A&H研究人员一起进行特定的需求分析，同时还需要与行业联系人密切合作，以了解事件数据的情况，以及如何将这些数据（作为英国文化产业产生的数据类型的一个例子）作为一种支持服务提供给A&H研究人员，以协商数据提供者和处理者之间的关系。该领域的任何服务还需要考虑隐私、版权和知识产权，以及特定的用户需求。我们的研究将支持数据存储库的开发和设计，用于大规模捕获和分析英国文化和创意产业数据，特别关注基于事件的数据。我们将与来自工业界、学术界和数据服务提供商的不同社区进行一系列范围界定和用户需求分析。我们将展示A&H研究人员如何使用或将来如何使用基于事件的数据，以及这种类型的研究在理解我们的经济、文化环境和物理基础设施规划方面可能产生的影响。我们将与我们的项目顾问The List一起进行一项试点研究，该公司是英国主要事件列表数据提供商，在该领域拥有超过15年的运营经验。我们的目标是了解研究人员如何分析超过2GB的数据，涵盖2017年至2021年在英国组织的250万次活动。我们的产出将包括文化和创意产业数据服务的规范，包括资本、运营和支持成本，为如何建立一项服务提供路线图，该服务可以支持英国的A&H研究人员大规模了解文化和遗产产业。我们还将为A&H研究界提出一项技能和能力建设计划，帮助他们从利用高性能计算和数据分析的大规模数据服务中获取和使用这类创意产业信息。考虑到英国国家计算基础设施、节日等重大活动、创意产业研究人员之间存在的专业知识和合作，以及该大学最近在爱丁堡期货研究所（www.efi.ed.ac.uk）对艺术、人文和社会科学领域的数字方法进行的重大投资，爱丁堡大学处于独特的地位，能够开展这样的研究。

The UK has a world-leading cultural and creative economy, and every year there are hundreds of thousands of events, festivals, concerts, plays, and gigs, varying in scale from the very small and informal, to the large and coordinated. Events tell us much about the creative landscape: however, although data has been produced about them to facilitate listings, and ticket sales, there does not exist a service by which researchers can access this recently produced commercial data in order to generate accurate data-led analysis and visualisation of the UK's creative sector. Additionally, the data created by the events industry is large, and complex, involving commercial providers who have generated novel business models around data scraping, gathering, and dissemination. Any researcher who wishes to use this data has to navigate access to data, but also access to compute at scale, to generate novel understandings that may be of use in event planning, policy, or to identify potential trends, or opportunities for investment and support. Of particular interest at the moment is gathering accurate information on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the UK's events industry: although events data exists, no accurate reports have used this to understand the effects of the pandemic, and industry recovery. To provide such a data service that could support researchers, there needs to be an investigation into how best to provide this data to Arts and Humanities (A&H) researchers, many of whom have not undertaken data-analysis at this scale. Therefore, a particular needs-analysis requires to be done with A&H researchers, whilst also working closely with industry contacts to understand the landscape of events data, and how this - as an example of the type of data that is produced by the UK's cultural industries - can be provided to A&H researchers as a supported service that negotiates relationships between data providers and processors. Any service in this area needs to also consider privacy, copyright, and intellectual property, as well as looking at particular user needs. Our research will support the development and design of a data repository for the capture and analysis of UK cultural and creative industries data at scale, focussing particularly on events-based data. We will undertake a range of scoping and user needs analysis with a diverse community from industry, academia, and data service providers. We will show how A&H researchers are already using, or could make future use, of events based data, and the impact this type of research may have in understanding our economy, cultural environment, and physical infrastructure planning. We will undertake a pilot study, with our project consultants The List, who are the UK's major events listings based data provider and have over 15 years of experience operating in this area. We will aim to understand how researchers can analyse over 2GB of data covering 2.5m events organised in the UK between 2017 and 2021. Our outputs will include a specification for a cultural and creative industries data service that includes capital, operational, and support costs, providing a roadmap for how to build a service that can support the UK's A&H researchers in understanding the cultural and heritage industries at scale. We will also propose a skills and capacity building programme for the A&H research community in accessing and using this type of creative industry information from a large-scale data service that utilises High Performance Computing and Data Analytics. The University of Edinburgh is uniquely placed to be able to carry out such a study, given the conjunction of expertise which exists, and collaborations, between national UK computing infrastructure, major events such as the festivals, creative industry researchers, and the university's recent major investment into digital approaches across the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in the Edinburgh Futures Institute (www.efi.ed.ac.uk).