At a time when Canadian cultural sovereignty is gaining in prominence across the country, we need cultural data to truly understand the importance of culture to Canada and its communities, says OCAD U President Emerita Dr. Sara Diamond who is the co-principal investigator of a collaborative research project addressing this need.
Although cultural data is currently collected across distinct levels of government, institutions, funders, arts organizations, community groups and academics, it is scattered, inconsistently described, and often siloed. Even when data exists, it can be hard to find or use due to lack of documentation, unknown provenance, or unclear usage rights.
This challenge inspired the research team to think about how to bring clarity and coherence to this landscape.
The result?
The creation of the Canadian Cultural Data Catalogue that provides a centralized, searchable tool that connects artists, researchers, policymakers and organizations with cultural data resources across the country. This open-source secure platform, with all its servers in Canada, is currently a prototype pilot of three provinces and national datasets.
“The catalogue helps users quickly access high-quality, actionable information so they can make informed choices, build stronger cases, tell richer stories, advocate effectively, and better understand the evolving cultural landscape,” explains Dr. Diamond.
ABOUT DR. DIAMOND
Dr. Diamond is a computer scientist, historian, artist and designer who holds deep interest in the relationships between human practices, diverse cultures, technologies and environments.
She brings decades of collaborative research and has led major research networks. Her recent projects include wearable mobile support for seniors; searchable cultural databases; audience engagement and impact tools for screen media; a digital platform for collaboration across archives, complete community developments to support affordable, healthy communities supported by visualization technology, and support for Indigenous-led AI.
Earlier in her life, she enjoyed a career as a video artist, curator and historian. From 1997 to 2007, she created a turn-of-the-century creative neural network. She founded and led the international Banff New Media Institute from 1995 to 2005.
She served as OCAD U president from 2005 to 2020 and is now a faculty member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a University Research Chair. She led OCAD U in its transition to full university status, to retain its traditional strengths in art and design, and become a research leader in creative technology, Indigenous visual culture, Black Canadian diasporic culture, and many other fields.
“I am so happy that I can dedicate this phase of my life to research and teaching and supporting the next generations of research talent,” says Dr. Diamond who is the recipient of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario, and the Queen’s Jubilee Medal for Service to Canada.
OCAD U caught up with Dr. Diamond to learn more about the Canadian Cultural Data Catalogue research project.
What drew you to this field of study?
I have worked with cultural data as a policy leader, university president, grants writer and in my volunteer life as Chair of the Toronto Arts Foundation and Chair of Nuit Blanche for many years. I also work with data in my research as an ethnographic historian, designer, an artist and tech researcher.
The catalyst for the project was an online conference that Synapse C, led by Juliette Denis, the Audience Agency (UK) and I organized in 2021 with about 2,500 attendees (DataEchoCulture), which considered all manner of audience data, what it is and how to analyze it.
Afterwards, we tried to pull together a research team across Canada to continue data-driven research and could not find the players and the datasets. The idea of a catalogue that would pull together both data and its creators was born.
I also have collaborated for a decade with Magnify Digital, in the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and Mitacs funded research to support the collection of audience data and festival impact data for Canadian screen media. We helped to create ScreenMiner. That research also underscored the importance of a unified place to access Canadian screen media data.
What problem or question is your research trying to solve or answer, and why is this important?
We are addressing the need to find datasets that describe cultural activities, infrastructure, histories, audiences, economies, and the near impossibility of finding those datasets.
By creating a centralized catalogue, we aim to make cultural datasets discoverable and understandable—while respecting their original contexts and creators. As a result, people have access to data to support planning; undertake historical and contemporary analyses of culture and how it is changing; better understand the economy, audiences, employment to make the case about the impacts of arts and culture; and understand rights ownership in an era of AI expansion.
We do not store the data itself, instead, we provide rich metadata (descriptions of what is in the dataset) about where the data lives, who owns it, what it covers, and how it can be accessed. This helps surface useful datasets that might otherwise remain hidden or underused. It also allows people to create connections between datasets that support their analysis.
So far, we have built out our national datasets, Newfoundland and Labrador; Quebec; and Ontario. Our database includes:
This approach ensures coverage across scales and disciplines, from large-scale policy to hyperlocal archives. Our “taxonomy” (categories of where to place datasets are grounded in existing cultural classification systems that are already widely used in Canada and internationally.
We are also building a tagging system to ensure that interdisciplinary forms (for example “spoken word”) and culturally diverse forms and practices are discoverable.
We respect Indigenous communities’ right to govern their own data and identify when datasets contain Indigenous information, who the data pertains to, and whether that community has provided permissions for its use. If that documentation is missing, we flag it in our metadata.
How do you see the research findings contributing to your field or affecting people’s lives in the real world?
We have launched the pilot/prototype and it can be used by researchers, arts organizations, artists, government, and private sector entities. We include data stories that can be explored to understand reasons why a group of datasets are valuable to address a question and then shows the datasets. We have a concierge service to help users find datasets.
For example, museums and galleries are increasingly exploring ways to activate their spaces through live performance. This approach builds cross-disciplinary connections, attracts new audiences, and creates opportunities for collaboration across cultural sectors.
So, to plan such initiatives effectively, an organization might explore datasets on:
Our catalogue is especially useful for smaller institutions or researchers who do not have dedicated data teams or want to expand their data horizon.
Internationally, cultural data infrastructure is advancing quickly. For example, Australia’s Cultural Data Online aggregates data from government, researchers, and arts organizations to support national planning. The European Union’s Cultural Heritage Cloud brings together digital heritage objects under shared protocols for access and reuse.
And in the United States, SMU DataArts developed the Cultural Data Profile—a standardized survey used by thousands of arts organizations to identify trends affecting cultural organizations, assess local and organizational vibrancy (audience, resources, perceptions) and illuminate barriers to access and inclusion.”
Canada needs the same kind of environment to support cultural data.
Are you working with any collaborators, institutions, or funding bodies on this project?
The original collaborators are the Cultural Policy Hub at OCAD U (Miriam Kramer, executive director, Government and Community Relations and Public Policy), Synapse C (team led by Juliette Denis, Manager of Collaborative Projects) and Galeries Ontario Galleries (team led by Executive Director Dr. Zainub Verjee). The Arts Impact Partnership, led by Toronto Metropolitan University, where I am leading components of research, is a new partner. We are in dialogue with the First Nations Information Governance Council to ensure appropriate application of OCAP© and Care principles.
OCAD U students and alum researchers are Michael Li, Silvana Sari, Juan Sulca, Bunzigiye Zawadi (Star).
We have demonstrated the catalogue to municipal, provincial, and federal arts councils – these are ongoing dialogues.
Since we began in 2022, Canada now has other data aggregation projects and we are working in various way with these, including Make the Case which is Business for the Arts toolkit to argue for arts funding; MassCulture’s Data Narratives for the Arts (DNA), which provides rich financial data; and the University of Toronto’s Canadian Urban Data Catalogue, which includes open-source municipal data. These are all innovators in data collection, advocacy and research. Of significant importance is LINCS, a Canada Foundation for Innovation and Research Alliance funded repository of cultural and humanities datasets.
Our funding comes from Synapse C, Galeries Ontario Galleries, Mitacs and the Ontario Research Excellence Fund.