“Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width”: Big Data for Quality and Performance Evaluation in the Arts and Cultural Sector and the Case of “Culture Metrics”

This chapter concerns the development of methodologies for measuring the quality of artistic experiences and managing the performance of arts and cultural organizations, which now speculatively include the potential use of big data. It presents empirical research conducted for a publicly funded “Digital R&D” project* called “Culture Metrics,” which brought together technology partners, arts and cultural organizations, and researchers. Culture Metrics involved the development and testing of a digital platform “Culture Counts,” which has been designed to support evaluation. Through a short review of the literature on the developing interest in data science and analysis of the Culture Metrics project as a case study in the changing data culture of arts organizations, we reflect on the emerging rhetoric of big data within the sector and its application to performance measurement, self-evaluation, and data-driven decision-making.We argue that the call for data science represented by initiatives such as CultureCounts presents an attempt to break from the conventions of traditional evaluation for arts organizations that offers a potential solution for quality assurance.However, in its early development stage, Culture Metrics reveals that for this to be successful, the significant tensions surrounding the use of quantitative data for this purpose, the stretched resources for analysis and, most importantly, an overarching absence of big data will need to be overcome.