Would you like to team up with Medialab and help us to explore the Katowice’s culture while realizing your own research microproject? If your idea fits our bill, you might be eligible for a microgrant and professional backing from the Medialab team. We are interested in all kinds of activities, be it queries, focus studies, analyses, developing data sets as well as research tools, e.g. scripts for web data retrieval. The results of your work will then be showcased as part of a special exhibition to be held in October 2017, and later in a publication summarising of Medialab’s activities produced as part of the Shared Cities project.

We invite all interested researchers, students, urban activists, city enthusiasts, people with different skills, regardless of formal education. In addition to traditional culture and city researchers, such as sociologists, cultural researchers, urban planners, economists, etc., we welcome collaborations with software developers, data analysts, designers and other people working with data who can propose out-of-the-box research approaches.

23 Dec 2016: opening date for submission of entries
31 Jan 2017: closing date for submission of entries (date-received basis)
7 Feb 2017: announcement of results
31 May 2017: research results submission date

Beyond the professional level of the entries, our main evaluation criterion will be how well they fit into Medialab’s scope of activities. What matters for us is not only the research topic, but also sharing the produced data under an open license, so that it can be utilised in further studies. Before deciding to enter the competition, please refer to the project guidelines.

The entries will be assessed by members of the Medialab research team, Karol Piekarski and Paulina Urbańska, in collaboration with Anna May of the University of Silesia.

If you have questions or queries about any aspect of the competition, please contact us at info@medialabkatowice.eu.

Themes

We study cultural activities in Katowice with particular emphasis on their city-forming aspect. We are interested in how activities in public space intermingle with the activeness of social media users and try to take advantage of the research potential of digital tools for data analysis and visualisation.

Who are the creators of Katowice’s culture?

How to identify and present the rich network of culture creators in Katowice – from high-profile events and official institutions, to city enthusiasts, and Web-based aficionados? By mapping the city’s cultural actors, such as grass-roots artists and content promoters, city enthusiasts, but also official entities – we will try to visualise the network of Katowice’s culture creators. Particular consideration will be given to the activity of entities and organisations operating on the internet, as this often escapes the attention of mainstream researchers and media. This study is based on data obtained from the Web and especially from social media sites.

Where do cultural event participants come from?

Where do the participants of the city’s concerts, festivals, meetings, discussions and workshops come from? How many Katowice residents participate in the events and which localities do they come from? Are the events easily accessible by public transport? What means of transport are used to get to the event venues? Answers to these questions will allow us to find out the reach of individual institutions (district, citywide, metropolitan, supraregional), as well as the extent to which they are accessible to all residents. In this part of the study we use data on participants’ places of residence obtained through surveys, as well as data on public transport in the city.

How do cultural event participants energise the city centre?

We are interested to find out if, and to what extent, events goers enliven the city centre. Do they come specifically to take part in the event, or go after work or while running errands in Katowice? How do they move around the city? How much money do they spend? Do they visit the pubs and restaurants, or just go for a walk in the city’s public spaces? Do the visitors to Katowice’s culture zone call in at the centre, or simply return to their homes? In order to answer these questions, we collect data through surveys and would welcome some focus studies to enhance their results.

What have been Katowice’s top events in recent years?

In this part of the study, we will try to determine the dynamics of Katowice’s cultural life since the city entered a bid for European Capital of Culture 2016. By developing web-based data, we set out to examine what have been some of the most important events and trends within that period. The summer music festivals? The revamping of Mariacka Street? Or, maybe, the opening of the Silesian Museum and concerts in the culture zone? We hope to be able to find out that and more as we explore data from online news and social media services.

How do web users help create a new image of the city?

How do web users harness social media to create modern urban identities based on local heritage, such as stories of compelling interest to local communities or living industrial traditions? Using web-based data, we strive to examine how various local enthusiasts build a new mythology of Katowice by publishing photographs of city life, archival materials, photos of neon signs, architectural landmarks etc. Our research will be based on data acquired from social media, including Facebook and Instagram. We might also attempt a more detailed study of the most active content creators.

What you can do for us

• acquire and/or develop data that is of interest to us
• conduct in-depth studies of selected issues or verify the partial results of studies
• propose a completely new approach to the problems studied by us

Sample activities

• interviews, surveys, etc.
• focus studies to enhance our research findings
• archive searches, acquisition of public data from different sources or data from the Web and social media services
• independent development of data on a selected topic
• analysis, visualisation and/or interpretation of data (e.g. from surveys) provided by us
• creating tools for data acquisition, processing and analysis (e.g. applications or scripts to retrieve data from the Web)

Content sharing

• the results of the projects should be made available under an open license (preferably Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0), unless the nature of the data makes it impossible (e.g. public domain content or data from social networking sites available on a different basis).
• as far as practicable, especially in the case of numerical data or survey results, the collected content should be made available in open formats that allow further automatic processing (details to be agreed at the implementation stage).

Our data

• current results of the survey of Katowice’s cultural events participants (csv)
• data obtained from Facebook (to request access to the sql database, please email us at info@medialabkatowice.eu)

Documents

• Competition Rules
• Entry Form
• Project Assessment Sheet

Shared Cities: Creative Momentum is a European cultural platform addressing the urban challenges of contemporary European cities. SCCM is a joint project of Goethe-Institut (DE), Czech Centres (CZ), reSITE (CZ), Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (SK), Association of Belgrade Architects (RS), Contemporary Architecture Centre (HU), Katowice City of Gardens (PL), KUNSTrePUBLIK (DE), Mindspace (HU), Old Market Hall Alliance (SK), Res Publica – Cities Magazine (PL). Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Local partner: Regional Institute of Culture in Katowice.