Abstract:

The cultural sector plays a vital role in contemporary society. The range of activities and projects undertaken by established cultural agents - public administrations and institutions, cultural professionals and the third sector (NGOs and non-profit cultural associations and foundations) - show different ways of imagining the political, social, economic and cultural aspects of a community and of a time.

A constant concern of fine art and design departments is to determine what factors are significant for defining the contemporary culture in which humanistic theoretical discourses and research into creative practices are framed.

This document provides, in the context of the society of knowledge and digital humanities, information about the construction and functioning of a model of networked cultural information based on standards, protocols and internationally recognized EU regulations: European Directive 2003/98/CE (17/11/2003), 2013/37/UE (26/06/2013) and Inspire (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) 2007/2/CE (14/03/2007). It describes the identity of a group of European cultural institutions (contemporary art museums and centers of alternative culture) through the digital content shown on their websites (Open Data). It analyses the humanistic and aesthetic concepts that these art centers offer, the terminological and processual research they partake in and the work methodologies they use. It also shows the collaborative research tools for data and information management that have been used to evaluate the European cultural sector in social and cultural terms (Web Scraping) and to present the results obtained (Visual Cartographies, Geolocation).

Our objective is to present the situation of contemporary European culture in the academic context; to use Open Data and IT tools for visualization of information and geolocation to give an overall vision of how the European cultural environment is currently structured and of what it offers; and to understand the diversity of cultural agents present and the complexity of activities linked to culture that they undertake for creation, production and dissemination. The paper identifies and describes the main lines of institutional activity that contribute to fomenting and modernizing the field of culture. The goal is to provide a vision of contemporary European culture through statistical and semantic indicators and through the use of tools for the visual representation of data and geolocation.

This article facilitates qualitative and quantitative data that serves to generate an analysis of aesthetic and social concepts related to contemporary art. The results obtained are useful for generating knowledge in an academic setting and for broadening the critical analysis of art professionals. With this paper we hope to contribute to a revitalization of the methodologies of teaching, learning and research that take place in universities. We seek an approach that integrates the work done in art academies with that of institutions that manage the results of their research, and we hope to do so in Europe.

Keywords:

Open Data, Visual Mapping, Geolocation, Contemporary Art, Web Scraping.