Impossible Partnerships: Distributed Data and the Science of Art

FROM 3pm to 5.30pm, 24th MARCH 2017 @ Somerset House – Room TBC

The Culture Capital Exchange, in collaboration with The Cornelius Arts Foundation, and DataKind UK invites you to a roundtable discussion about distributed data in relation to the science of art and the challenges of gathering robust and enough evidence to make the case for art impact.

The Cornelius Arts Foundation (TCAF), a registered charity, seeks to understand and build data-based evidence of the ways art can have a transformative effect on people’s lives and in society. The charity is mostly interested in drawing out the intrinsic rather than the instrumental value of art. Our R&D focuses on education, innovation, sustainability and wellbeing.

DataKind UK: a registered charity dedicated to using data science for social good. We believe that the same advanced algorithms and data science techniques that the private sector use to increase profit can be used to help charities have a greater impact. We bring together teams of pro bono data scientists with social change organisations to work on projects designed to move the needle on tough social issues.

The discussion aims to explore new ways of coordinating, scoping and substantiating research, in particular in the context of distributed knowledge and networked frameworks bringing together organisations and initiatives in direct contact with the public.

Potential topics to be discussed include:

• How can one establish a continuum between the data collected by non-scientists and scientists?
• What kind of shared standards, protocols and tools are needed to facilitate data integrity and readiness to scale up?
• How to apprehend cultural diversity, which brings more layered and complex sets of data, in the context of data integration?
• What can be learnt from precedents such as Open Source, the sharing economy, connected hubs or collectives?
• How to break down barriers to sharing data in the cultural sector?
• How to protect privacy and IP while allowing the cultural sector to benefit from the scalability of shared data?
• Can blockchain solutions be applied to open and interconnect data sources?

This Impossible Partnership will be led by Marianne Magnin, TCAF Board Chair, and Emma Prest, General Manager, DataKind UK. This gathering will be of interest but not limited to the enthusiasts of the social sciences, art, knowledge management and new forms of collective organisations. This includes ethnographers, sociologists, economists, statisticians, data scientists, information technologists…

Impossible Partnerships: a series of small-scale, informal, convivial meetings, developed and curated by TCCE to boost the collaborative potential of projects and topics, in order to support new networks between research and the creative sectors. Throughout the year, we map common trends among researchers and entrepreneurs, tackling topics from a variety of angles. As a result, we foster aggregate of collaborative networks will thrive, develop across institutions, and reach out beyond the academy.