IndexThe virtuous cycle and validity questionsThe search for negative answers: public engagement at MONADigtal data aggregation: measuring online engagementPromoting deeper engagement through digital participationConclusionsIn the field of management artistic, audience involvement is an increasingly important and influential area of ​​study. As the arts sector strives to create a more accessible, participatory and democratic experience for audience members, it has become increasingly important to accurately measure the ways in which audiences engage in artistic activities and the impact this engagement has. The positive individual and social impacts of artistic endeavor are often necessary to justify continued funding from both public sources and private funding bodies. It is not difficult to see how this creates an inherently biased measurement system, which encourages the perpetuation of positive narratives over meaningful and nuanced data. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay One way it may be possible to help eliminate these biases is to leverage digital technologies, particularly social media data mining to freely measure audience engagement from potentially confounding variables such as the researcher's influence on the interaction, geographic location and social influence. This essay will examine the ways in which older data collection methods fail to address these potential biases, while examining the use of new data collection techniques to measure engagement. Beyond this, we will examine the case study of a dance company that leverages digital technology not only to measure audience engagement, but to facilitate engagement and participation on a deeper, more democratic level. The Virtuous Cycle and Questions of Validity There has long been and increasingly been a critique of how best to “measure the success of performing arts programs,” emphasizing that current and traditional methods of quantitative analysis do not provide the level of nuanced insight necessary to meaningfully shed light on the ways in which the arts impact audiences. “Artistic impact assessments tend to be poorly conceived and implemented” and, more importantly, “biased towards achieving a positive outcome.” The reason for this becomes clear: funding bodies do not want to continue or increase funding to arts organizations whose programming has a neutral or negative impact on audience engagement. This seems fair enough from the point of view of these financiers, who naturally want a return on their investment. There is a new solution to the problem of self-selection bias (where an audience member is predisposed to give a positive rating of any arts programming they choose to visit due to the fact that they are unlikely to engage in art outside of artistic context). blue). By inviting "non-attendees" to become audience members for a theater performance, researchers hope to measure the difference in response between regular attendees and these so-called "non-attendees." However, by inviting participants who otherwise would not have gone to the production, a new bias has been created: non-participants come to the show knowing that they will be asked for their input later, and therefore see the production through a lens that would not have existed if they had chose to go alone. The variable in the results and the report also appears to influence the members of theaudience towards finding something positive to comment on. This suggests that further steps need to be taken to eliminate potential biases in public engagement research. Searching for Negative Answers: Public Engagement at MONAA An interesting discussion and new approach to addressing the perpetuation of positive narratives within public engagement research within the paper is the short section of the conclusion covering the approach of the Tasmanian Museum of Old and New Art researching the public. As described in the document, gallery visitors are encouraged to bring an iPod Touch with them to their visit, which is loaded with software used to rate each installation. Users can "love" or "hate" the artwork as they move around. It has been suggested that MONA's existence as a privately owned and funded gallery allows for this embrace of negative feedback, while at the same time allowing the gallery to continue to present thought-provoking works of art to the public. However, although new, this method of feedback does little to address the "virtuous circle" problem, as gallery owner David Walsh has "threatened to remove the most popular works from the exhibition". This threat would seem entirely ironic and, even if not, simply serves to reverse the vicious cycle without addressing the issues that cause it to arise. Digital Data Collection: Measuring Engagement Online A public engagement research method that attempts to address the problem The inherent biases involved in face-to-face surveys and interviews are presented in the Pew Research Center paper regarding the use of digital data collection digital data to create larger, more diverse and less easily confused study groups. The method, called Propensity Score Matching (PSM), is used to "correct for bias in online samples", creating a control group against which the experimental group can be accurately compared. The method attempts to show the impact of audience engagement by showing whether an audience member who interacts with the art shows a change in their knowledge, behavior or attitudes compared to the control group of "very similar" people who did not engage . The main advantage of this method is that it almost completely eliminates self-selection bias, as each group in the study is thought to be equally likely to have experimented with programming, but one group, for whatever reason, did not engage. One problem with this method is that, because it uses social media to leverage data, it is biased towards an audience that uses social media more often; that is, a younger audience. However, given the relative ease with which researchers have been able to create their own control and experimental groups, and the ability to control many of the biases inherent in analogue methods of data collection, they suggest that it is worth further exploring the opportunities afforded by digital technologies. , especially social media, provide food for thought. Promoting deeper engagement through digital participation With the continued rise of social digital technologies, there seems to be a great opportunity emerging to change the way audiences interact with the arts. So far in this essay we have explored the different ways we can use these new and some older methods to measure audience engagement. What is more interesting, however, are the ways in which we might actually promote deeper and more democratic methods of engagement with art by taking advantage of this great.