MESOC TOOLS: The development of Au Culture platform

MESOC generates, uses and shares a number of tools during the project aimed to enable the creation of knowledge about the social dimension of culture beyond the boundaries of the project.

With this regard, the University of Valencia is developing the AU Culture platform, a digital application that aims to measure the preferences, the behaviour and the individual impacts of cultural participation.

The AU Culture Platform is an application that allows evaluating, from a wide perspective, the impacts generated on individuals after participation in a cultural event. The format is an application that can be used on mobile phones or any other digital platform. It aims to become a democratic tool for evaluating the services that cultural or policy institutions can adopt by using an interacting platform that produces big data. The platform is designed to generate a database that allows us to understand, at an aggregated level, how the satisfaction is constructed in the participation in a cultural event, which permits us to compare between cultural events and to analyse the reactions for each specific segment of audiences.

The following figure summarises the logical architecture of AU Culture in three different functionalities.

1. Person. This part collects socio-demographic information, cultural interests and habits about the users. Depending on the data entered in this section, the user will be associated with one Cultotype rather than another. The Cultotype is a cultural profile that defines what kind of cultural consumer the user is.
    
2. Event. The Au Culture platform shows various events taking place in the city where the user is geolocated.
    
3. Evaluation. After having participated in a specific event, the user will be able to evaluate it. Finally, the user could compare its results with those of other users who have rated the same event.

With this kind of information, the app develops intelligent algorithms for recommending cultural events around the city, allowing better matching and efficiency in the connection between cultural supply and demand, reducing transaction costs in the cultural ecosystem.

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Figure 1: AU Culture Platform architecture.

The Au Culture platform presents a comprehensive approach to measure the individual impacts of cultural participation and cultural users’ behaviour, combining both socio-psychological and economic approaches. The model combines contingent evaluation techniques with the perception analysis of the cultural experiences to evaluate the individual impacts of cultural participation. For example, the Au Culture platform asks through a questionnaire what is the perception, on a scale of 1 to 10, of the cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, social and identity impacts that a cultural event produces on an individual. The results obtained are contrasted with another group of questions that, through contingent valuation techniques (Cuccia, 2003), contrast coherence through the analysis of willingness to pay or willingness to be compensated.

The main results will be original research with recommendations in terms of cultural policy innovations and an EU wide database available to other researchers, cultural operators and field practitioners.