An Internet of Cultural Things: Creative Explorations of Data in Cultural Institutions

The project will examine born-digital material generated by the British Library. This cultural institution of international standing will make available data about itself--ranging from items ingested to reading room occupancy to catalogue searches--which primarily has remained available for internal use. We will collaborate with a practice-based digital artist and make this data visible in a series of temporary site specific installation projects open to public engagement. The project presents a creative and collaborative intervention into the growth in digital information in cultural institutions and addresses the research question: How does making visible the cultural data generated in situ illuminate and transform the way both people and cultural institutions interact?

This project builds directly on the current AHRC-funded research projects of our Principal Investigator. The first, 'Our Data Ourselves' studies the 'big social data' we generate through our mediated cultural practices, namely mobile devices. The second project, 'Empowering Data Citizens' examines how that big social data might be transformed into open data as a means for creative and cultural empowerment in new data communities. In all instances, data democratisation is at the forefront, insofar as we seek to make available the data we generate as an open resource for public engagement and scholarly inquiry.

We will continue to make significant and innovative contributions through our Small Grant by expanding our focus to the data generated in and by our shared cultural institutions. Partnering with a data visualisation artist, our scoping project will create an exemplar for engaging with new forms of cultural data. We propose that this will provide new insights into not the Internet of Things (IoT) but what we call the Internet of Cultural Things (IoCT).

Our research question expands upon a key area of interest in networked digital culture. The IoT denotes the diffusion of the internet-as a data generating, transmitting, receiving and processing infrastructure-into the material world and everyday life. The IoT-be it the appliances in your home or a traffic sensor network-is embedded all around us, in multiple scales of things in order to reach smoother, effective, affective and predictive "smart" situations.

We propose the IoCT as a means to discuss the networked and data-rich nature of cultural things that constitute institutions. This enables us to better think of cultural institutions not just as physical repositories of holdings and collections but as living organisms of data. Thus in partnership with British Library and the artist, we will develop a critical and creative set of working ideas and practices via data on digital items ingested, catalogue searches, requests, books re-shelved, numbers of new reader passes, etc. Our focus on new data aspects of cultural institutions enables us to demonstrate how the British Library is increasingly built on data. We will create an exemplar for further research into the IoCT wherein users are points of networked articulation and dynamic visualisation between people and cultural institutions reveals cultural things as material data relations.

Our creative and collaborative intervention combines artistic methods (data visualization), critical humanities and partnership with the British Library and addresses the following research questions:
1) What are best practices for engaging with such data as created by BL?
2) What is the specific added-value provided by visual methods in engaging with born-digital content created in expert systems and environments?
3) How does the site-specific output of the partnership between the artist and BL facilitate user-centric forms of public engagement and development of data literacy?
4) What are the best practices and ideas that are transferable from our creative intervention into data culture?

1. Direct project benefits
a) Enhancing understanding and use of born digital cultural data with BL
Impact: Through the project, the British Library will develop new ways to utilise its cultural data and deploy its various metrics through creative public engagement and display. The project will open such data sets, which previously were available only for internal use. This allows significant insight in developing self-understanding as a cultural institution and better respond to digital transformations of datafication.

Pathway: Using the exhaust data will develop a new layer of understanding of the cultural institution via data relations that will be illuminated through creative practice. This resultant pathway is twofold: i) the emergence of the data visualisation/digital practice project that responds to the questions and briefs set by the British Library, and ii) related research into big data, artistic practice and data visualisation.

b) Enhancing discussion about data literacy through creative practice
Impact: We will engage British Library users and the general public through a site-specific installation that facilitates greater participatory and interactive relations with cultural data. We will draw on experience and insights from our existing AHRC projects to promote an agenda of citizen's data literacy.

Pathway: The artist and the project team will create a framework of ideas and artistic practices that both produces institutionally useful insights and actively engages users through a public-facing event. This entails a site-specific art project, which engages the data-rich material environment of the British Library. Our project will also draw on early ideas tested in a January 2015 pilot project, internally funded by the BL, which will scope modes of visualisation of data metrics produced at the institution.

c) Advances in cross-disciplinary methodologies available for data-driven research in the arts & humanities
Impact: The project will have a long-term impact by advancing the state-of-the-art of the methodologies, project partnerships and interdisciplinary teams in the digital arts and humanities sector and its relevance for the public cultural heritage sector (represented in this instance by the BL) and the wider public (through a data literacy agenda).

Pathway: The developed transparent methods and cross-disciplinary partnerships will facilitate the involvement of the wider community of stakeholders, in workshops, the symposium and the reporting of the research results that can also feed towards follow-up projects.

2. Wider Benefits in Economy and Society
a) Economic Benefits
Impact: The Cultural Heritage sector and more widely the Creative Industries sector is one of the most significant in the knowledge economy and the digital economy. Besides direct economic benefits, the sector is of indirect support to a wider set of stakeholders who work with the materials, resources and services provided by institutions and libraries such as the British Library through a creative reuse and remix.

Pathway: As described above, the various activities and the development of best practices for creative use of such exhaust data will help cultural institutions realise new forms of cultural and economic value through this born digital material.

b) Social Benefits: Open data and data literacy
Impact: The BL gives a prominent public platform from which to address key challenges in digital culture. This enables us to raise more discussion about creative practice as a way to understand data and data literacy. In turn, this will feed into a stronger sense of how to interface creative practice produced knowledge with policy work.

Pathways: Issues of creative practice, open data and cultural uses of data are the main agenda that are enhanced by the artist's participation. We will also use international links to reach a wider network of stakeholders in the art/archive-sector of practitioners.