Katowice has always been an unfinished city in motion. Within its short history the city had four different names before settling on Katowice – a symbol of an ideal workers' settlement and communist success.
After 1989, Katowice sought a new storyline. While industry still plays an important role, the city in the middle of a two million conurbation has become an academic and business centre with creative ambitions displayed during the preparations of its European Capital of Culture 2016 application. As part of Shared Cities, Medialab Katowice, an experimental platform, presented the results of their unique research study revealing a complex network that interweaves through the cultural ecosystem of the city.
Katowice City of Gardens was created in February 2016 to support cultural and educational activities in the region, one of them being the Medialab Katowice project. During Shared Cities, researchers in Medialab Katowice were busy crunching vast amounts of big data and conducting thousands of interviews about the cultural ecosystem of Katowice – only to turn this extensive research into exciting visualizations and impressive knowledge. Visit the Data for Culture website to find answers to questions like: What information does Facebook reveal about cultural events? Who are their participants? Who should switch from car to public transport to get to the city centre?
Katowice City of Gardens wants to understand our cities better by visualizing and evaluating large real-time data from social networks and apps in their project “Data for Culture”.
How to investigate events in the data (overload) culture? Do we need new tools and methods for this? For a dozen months, a group of city researchers, designers, programmers and data scientists explored the cultural ecosystem of Katowice. Take a look at the outcomes of the study of Katowice’s cultural ecosystem!
What were the main features and biggest challenges for Katowice? How did the use of field data help address some of these problems during the four years of the Shared Cities project? Find the answer in the interview with Karol Piekarski from Katowice Miasto Ogrodów, Poland.
MICHIEL DE LANGE: Strengthening public values through data
An interview on urban data, citizen engagement strategies and smart city with Michiel de Lange: The bottom line of any municipal data project is to strengthen public values through data The role of data in today’s cities is already pretty huge and will only become more important. […] a yet untapped potential of using data for engaging citizens with their environment, and allowing them to have a say in the future of their cities.
Questions Raised by a Data-Driven Approach – Interview with Karin van Es
After her lecture at the Data (for) culture conference organized as part of Shared Cities: Creative Momentum conference in December 2017 Katowice, we interviewed Karin van Es (Utrecht Data School) on data-driven research and visualization.
12 Things You Will Learn about Katowice Culture in Medialab’s Research
A few years ago, no one would have thought of Katowice becoming a city associated with culture. In 2015, however, following a brief yet intensive period of investment in cultural infrastructure and cultural events, Katowice joined the exclusive international group of UNESCO Creative Cities. Has the city undergone a true cultural revolution? Is Katowice’s current en-vogue status just a passing fad or could it be a herald of major changes in the city centre? To find out, we teamed up with cultural researchers, designers, programmers and analysts to study responses given by 3.633 participants in over a dozen local events and to analyse tens of thousands of posts published in social media and web-based information services. What we present below is a 12-point list of things to look out for in the exhibition.
Data-driven research. Analysis and visualisation of Katowice’s cultural circuits
Our project aims to investigate certain cultural processes in Katowice, especially the circumstances of the inhabitants' participation in cultural events organised by various actors in the city.
