Tag Archive:
Technology and the Arts

What’s GIS Got To Do With The Arts?

By Published in 

Arts institutions, like most nonprofit organizations nationwide, rely on the generosity of their supporters and patrons to maintain their missions, meet their annual goals, expand their programing, or just fund their daily activities.  Facing enormous competition and with limited budgets, marketing and fundraising outreach activities must be calibrated with precision.

The Wilma Theater marketing gap analysis

When we think of marketing, we might think of the colorful and playful Target commercials, or the humorous ones from Progressive Insurance,  or even the tear-jerking ones from Hallmark.   Attracting new patrons, cultivating existing ones, diversifying audiences and programing certainly sound different from selling car insurance, but let’s not be fooled. It takes savvy individuals to get patrons through the doors of arts and culture institutions!

Arts organizations (and non-profits in general) are turning to GIS for the same reasons commercial organizations do – to better understand the geographic distribution and demographic composition of their current support bases and compare them with the total market potential for their programming or services.  What are some of the questions they’re asking?

  • What is the geographic extent of our current patron/ member base and how far are our services reaching?
  • What are the communities that match our patron base’s demographic characteristics that we are not targeting? (Read The Wilma Theater marketing gap analysis).
  • What are our constituents’ demographic characteristics and how do they compare with regional demographics?
  • How far do our patrons have to travel to reach us?  What are the most time-efficient routes?  What are some of the venues along the way that we could make deals with or sell ad placements to, like restaurants or cafes?
  • What is the correlation between the demographics of patrons from show/ exhibit A and from show/ exhibit B, and how do their geographic distributions compare?
  • In what legislative districts do our patrons live?

L.A. Stage Alliance arts census market penetration analysis performed for TRG Arts

Clearly, these questions do not pertain to arts and culture institutions only.  Spatial analyses can foster decision-making processes and reveal trends and issues, as well as provide stronger cases for support.  Our team of GIS Analysts, Tamara Manik-Perlman, Dana Bauer — and joining them in June, Daniel McGlone — have worked on multiple spatial analysis projects for a range of different nonprofit organizations including: Common Cause NY, the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children, Germantown Friends School, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, and the Sustainable Business Network, among many others.

What are your geographic questions? Let us know. We can probably help you find the answers.

 

Tags: , ,
Print This Print This Comments (0)

Muralfarm.org: How a Remarkable Public Art Collection is Benefiting from GIS

By Published in 
"Thanks to Muralfarm.org, one of the largest outdoor art galleries in the world can be explored, searched, and admired from one's own living room."

The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program is the nation’s largest mural program. Since 1984, the Mural Arts Program has created nearly 3,000 murals and works of public art in Philadelphia, which are now part of Philadelphia’s civic landscape and a source of inspiration to the thousands of residents and visitors who encounter them, earning Philadelphia international recognition as the “City of Murals.” The Mural Arts Program also engages over 100 communities each year in the transformation of neighborhoods through the mural-making process, and their free art education programs annually serve over 3,000 youth at sites throughout the city and at-risk teens through education outreach programs.

Some of the thousands of murals in the city of Philadelphia.

While the Mural Arts Program has evolved from an anti-graffiti program into a city-wide public art organization, it has become increasingly important for it to manage the myriad of information about each of the murals and the communities they serve. The Mural Arts Program needed to track and publish information about a whole range of details, including artists, assistants, sponsors, affiliated organizations, start, completion and dedication dates, maintenance activities, renovation and demolition details and (of course) the location of each mural. Organizing this type of information is not a unique concern for Mural Arts. Hundreds of organizations throughout the U.S. are managing public art programs and face similar issues. Emails about various pieces of art go back and forth within the organization, some data is stored in Excel, other data in Filemaker, photos in other systems, some of it is on the organization’s web site while much of it is not. And in the end, staff members have a hard time carrying out the mission of their organization efficiently while also effectively showcasing the full extent of their collection to the public, funders, and potential sponsors.

Sajara-powered mural search page on Muralfarm.org.

When the Mural Arts Program approached Azavea, they had a good sense of what they were looking for. And, after building PhillyHistory.org for the Philadelphia Department of Records to assist them with the management and showcasing of 100,000′s of historic photos of the city, we thought that a geographic collection like that of the Mural Arts Program would be a good fit for Sajara, our geographic digital asset management solution…And so Muralfarm.org was born.

Muralfarm.org enables the public to search for murals by artist, theme, date, keywords and of course by location and neighborhood. Visitors to Muralfarm.org can tag favorite murals, save searches, be notified when new murals are added thanks to GeoRSS feeds, and enjoy special features like viewing the murals in Google Earth and Google Maps – StreetView. At the same time, the Mural Arts Program staff can easily manage information pertaining to each mural through Sajara’s digital asset management tools. And because the whole system is web-based, artists, neighborhood residents, community groups, and Mural Arts Program staff members can leave comments, send messages, and make corrections online, thereby improving the database over time. By pairing both public access search capabilites with collection management tools, Mural Arts is able to use the Sajara platform to store critical information about its projects in a single place.

The Mural Arts Program has essentially created a huge outdoor, geographically distributed museum with the entire city as its canvas. Muralfarm.org brings more than 1,000 murals under one roof, enables the public to see them all, and creates a foundation for the program to more effectively manage information about each work of art. It’s a living, changing feast for the eyes!

By the way, have you seen our newly launched Sajara website? We think it’s quite slick, how about you? Send us your comments.

Tags: , , ,
Print This Print This Comments (0)

‘Locating Memory’ by Wil Lindsay: An Art Exhibit that’s Worth Being Put on the Map

By Published in 
"...'Locating Memory' is an interesting project that integrates a hacked GPS-based memory-locating apparatus with the experiences and memory of participating individuals"

GPS Prototype

Azavea is proud to announce that we will be sponsoring an art exhibit by Wil Lindsay, a Philadelphia-based electronic media artist, to be held November 14 – December 28, 2008 at the Esther M. Klein Art Gallery at the Science Center in University City.

Supporting an exhibit is a first for us, but ‘Locating Memory’ is an interesting project that integrates a hacked GPS-based memory-locating apparatus with the experiences and memory of participating individuals. Events experienced by participants will be cataloged and represented in the gallery space as an interactive multimedia installation. The exhibit is being held in partnership with The Hacktory, a local non-profit organization that promotes the use of technology in the arts. ‘Locating Memory’ is a collaboration between Lindsay and the participants of an electronics and programming workshop held at The Hacktory. Workshop attendees built their own programmable GPS receiver (a ‘GPS-A-Sketch’), learned about GPS communications, how to collect data with a receiver as well as create and play location-based games. Using the GPS-A-Sketch they created, the participants are contributing their experiences and memories they capture with the device as the raw data for Lindsay’s installation. Wil Lindsay is currently the artist-in-residence at The Hacktory, which promotes the use of technology in the arts through classes, community events, and shared facilities.

So check out the exhibit in the Esther M. Klein Art Gallery at 3600 Market Street in Philadelphia. The gallery will be open Monday through Saturday, 9am – 5pm, November 14 – December 28. The opening reception will be Friday, November 14, 5pm – 8pm.

Tags:
Print This Print This Comments (1)

Placing History: Released by ESRI Press

By Published in 
"It's an exciting time for historians, and this book is an expression of that innovation."

Our work on the PhillyHistory project and development of the Sajara® product has given us a chance to meet and work with many people working in the field of ‘historical GIS’. In 2005, we participated in the GeoHistory Symposium developed by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL). We have also been working on a project at the University of Pennsylvania called ‘Mapping the DuBois Philadelphia Negro’ for which we are developing a web-based mapping application to support this research project led by Dr. Amy Hillier, Professor of City and Regional Planning at U-Penn. We’ll write about that in a future Azavea Journal, but the big news this month is that Dr. Hillier’s new book, Placing History has just been released by ESRI Press.

The full title - Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship – is a mouthful, but describes the contents well. Co-edited by Amy Hillier and historical geographer, Anne Kelly Knowles, the book is a series of case studies and essays on the key issues faced when using GIS tools to visualize historical information. With more powerful and easy-to-use software tools, geography is being applied to historical research in new unprecedented ways. Old maps are being mashed up against new maps, historical records are being geocoded to discover new patterns, and quantities of documents are being scanned and georeferenced. It’s an exciting time for historians, and this books is an expression of that innovation. An added bonus is a supplemental CD with software, data, powerpoints, videos, and notes for educators.

This book has been a lot of work for the editors and authors, but we’re just super-proud to see our friend Amy getting published. And if you’d like to hear her and co-editor Anne Kelly Knowles talk about the new book, check out the podcast.

Tags: , ,
Print This Print This Comments (0)

PhillyHistory.org Resonates with Thousands of Philadelphians and Gets its own Exhibit

By Published in 
"This site is one of the most terrific things I've seen out of those who care about the history of this city." PhillyHistory.org user

PhillyHistory.org did it again! People are going nuts over it. It even received at Best of Philly! 2007 Award for best local website.

On top of that, Azavea, the City of Philadelphia Department of Records, and The Art Institute of Philadelphia partnered to organize an exhibit of more than 80 photos from the site. From images of trade, commerce, education, municipal services, arts and entertainment to photos of men and women actually building the city, the exhibit reflects the vitality, vibrancy and development of Philadelphia over the past 150 years. Images dating from the late 1800s, some never before seen by the public, are on display. “Philadelphia Stories: The Building of a Great American City” is free and located at the Art Institute’s 1622 Chestnut Street gallery until August 31.

Local press and TV covered the event heavily, which attracted droves of people to the gallery. Visitors were mesmerized, amused and moved by photos as varied as that of the “Rat Patrol”, the site of City Hall without the iconic building on it, men building the sewer system in mud up to their eye brows, and a worker seated next to William Penn’s head before the statue was lifted on top of City Hall.


Commissioner Joan Decker


Rachel Cheetham-Richard and Governor Rendell

In her address, Commissioner Joan Decker said: “Voices and stories  of the Philadelphians who helped shape our city can be heard through these images. It is our hope that it will inspire more Philadelphians to explore this historical treasure-trove and offers glimpses of both the heroic, tragic and everyday facets of the city’s long and rich history.”

Governor Rendell stopped by the exhibit opening reception on August 2 and picked two photos of the construction of City Hall as his favorites. Between a few hand shakes and camera flashes, he even took the time to chat about the project with us!

PhillyHistory.org is powered by Sajara. Stay tuned for next issue’s news about a mobile version of the software!

Tags: , , , ,
Print This Print This Comments (0)

2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference

By Published in 
"The nonprofit community is vibrant, sophisticated and mighty inspiring..."

The Nonprofit community is vibrant, sophisticated and mighty inspiring…

We experienced this first-hand at the NTEN (Nonprofit Technology Network) Conference in Washington, D.C in April. When one of our colleagues told us about this conference, we did not quite know what to expect but decided we would give it try. What a treat this was!

We met people involved in environmental issues, political advocacy, arts advocacy, micro-philanthropy, social mapping, youth issues, health and human services solutions, gays and lesbians’ rights, women’s rights, micro loans in India, Kung Fu and Lion Dance (yes! Indeed), workforce philanthropy, neighborhood revitalization, citizens’ rights, digital storytelling initiatives … and the list goes on.

I think that people sometimes assume that nonprofits don’t use or might not understand how to implement advanced technology in their daily activities. However, we attended workshops on API’s, Open Source CMSs, Mashups, Video Blogging, Online Advocacy Strategies, Online Donation Tools, Email Deliverance Options, E-Newsletters, Viral Marketing, and heard how some innovative uses of Flickr, mobile technology, online social networks, and YouTube can bring communities and organizations’ constituencies together. We met numerous people who knew about GIS and understood the applications and significance of spatial analyses is to support their decision-making processes.

NTEN claims that their “goal is to enable [their] members to do their jobs better, and to help their organizations strategically use technology so that they, in turn, will make the world a better, just, and equitable place.” After attending their conference, there is no doubt in our minds that their members are subscribing to and embracing this statement.

Tags: , ,
Print This Print This Comments (0)

Mapping The Wilma Theater

By Published in 


Photo by George Golem.

In Philadelphia’s vibrant cultural landscape, theaters and other arts organizations must work hard to cultivate new audiences while delivering excellent shows and experiences for all of their patrons. The Wilma Theater recently undertook a strategic analysis of its core audiences, including a geographic study carried out by Azavea. The study used the locations of existing Wilma patrons to identify untapped markets of theater-goers. Utilizing geographic data provided by the theater and specific census variables such as per capita income, household income, number of gay/lesbian couples, percent college educated, average family size, people per square mile, median age, and average household size, Azavea determined areas of Wilma high-density neighborhoods, and used this information to describe a “typical” Wilma neighborhood. We then identified other areas in the Southeastern Pennsylvania region with similar populations and compared the two maps, highlighting the most promising areas for increased attendance of the theater.

For more information see the Spring issue of this year’s Arts and Culture Advocate, a publication of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, in which this study was featured.

This project was performed as part of our internal research and development program. Azavea employees spend 10% of their time each month on personal research or pro bono projects, of which this analysis is just one example.

Tags: ,
Print This Print This Comments (0)
Copyright © 2001 - 2012; Azavea. All rights reserved.
340 North 12th Street, Suite 402
Philadelphia, PA 19107.
Tel: (215) 925 - 2600 Fax: (215) 925 - 2663

 
  • Azavea Journal
  • Azavea Atlas
  • Azavea Labs
  • Azavea.com