The Cultural sector has come a long way in the last decade to recognizing the value of access to good statistics concerning the whole value chain from creation to consumption. Recently a consortium led by a division of the Department of Canadian Heritage, the provincial culture departments and a few other interested parties have been working with Stats Canada to develop a Cultural Statistics Satellite account, in order to glean useful cultural statistics from census and other data pools.

This is providing the cultural sector with a potentially valuable tool to speak both to government and industry for the future development of culture as one of the key sectors of the economy.

A key need, stemming from this data, is an interpretive piece – to look at the statistical findings and translate them into understandable language and possibly look into trends, policy issues, recommendations and directions that will affect the future development of a healthy cultural sector.

The NBSPRN is helping the Cultural Human Resources Council of Canada find a group of researchers, data analysts as well as local arts and culture sector organizations with skills and interests in data analysis, creative data visualization and knowledge translation to participate in this endeavor. For more information and to find out how you can participate, reach out to NBSPRN’s Research Coordinator Sasha Caputo at sasha.caputo@rrps-nb-sprn.ca or Richard Hornsby, Cultural Human Resources Council of Canada at rhornsby@unb.ca.