A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of representing Fractured Atlas at the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference, an annual gathering of funders that is otherwise closed to non-grantmakers.

(Part of an occasional series on Fractured Atlas’s research philosophy and practices. For more articles, click here.) As those of you who have been following Fractured Atlas closely may know, we’ve been working on some innovative technological solutions for aggregating and analyzing data about the cultural sector for the past couple of years. This effort is taking myriad forms at the moment, but probably the most comprehensive manifestation is our cultural asset mapping software, Archipelago. As originally designed for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in connection with the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map (BACAM), Archipelago seeks to shed light on the following questions about the cultural sector:

(Cross-posted from the National Arts Marketing Project Conference Blog Salon over at ARTSBlog.) The hardest question to answer in arts research is “what would have happened if we had done things differently?” Researchers call this question the “counterfactual,” since it refers to a scenario that doesn’t actually exist. Generally speaking, it’s hard to measure things that don’t exist; hence the difficulty for arts research.

(This is the second in an occasional series on Fractured Atlas’s research approach and philosophy. The first can be found here.)

(Cross-posted from the NEA’s Art Works blog. The version that appears there was edited for length; this is the original.)