Coventry’s year as the UK City of Culture 2021 (UK CoC 2021) has generated an unprecedented amount of data relating to cultural participation and engagement across the city’s neighbourhoods and communities. This has made Coventry into a rich place for cultural data.
Alongside this, uniquely amongst local authorities, Coventry has a Household Survey − conducted every two to three years since 1988 − which asks a representative sample of Coventry residents about their views of their local area, city, behaviour, concerns, cultural participation and, in recent years, their wellbeing.
Managed by Coventry City Council’s Insights team, these data can be accessed amongst other demographic, housing and environment, economy and prospects, and health and wellbeing data, through the Coventry Citywide Intelligence Hub and Headline Statistics. This enables cultural data collected through UK CoC 2021 to be compared and contrasted with other metrics across time and geographical scale.
The Coventry City Council Insight team produces a regular e-bulletin that provides information on a range of city related topics. The team can be contacted for further information.
The Cultural Policy and Evaluation Summit, held in June 2021, included a discussion on ‘How needs-led cultural investment and programming can be planned and tracked by incorporating a wider range of data sources than traditional audience strategy data‘. This included Si Chun Lam − Coventry City Council, Mark Scott − Warwick Business School and Katy Raines − Indigo Consulting: Coventry Cultural Policy and Evaluation Summit (day 2) – YouTube
Coventry Cultural Place Profiler
The Coventry Cultural Place Profiler has been designed to enable cultural organisations to plan and deliver against place-based outcomes using cultural and non-cultural data. The profiler allows users to find information about a place at a hyper-local level to understand the needs of communities when planning cultural activity.
The Cultural Place Profiler is split into three sections:
- an Area indicator that provides details for a selected Coventry location, together with comparative city-wide data
- a Single Map Indicator that shows variance across different areas of the city
- a Dual Map Indicator that enables direct comparisons of data for chosen locations and shows any correlation.
Coventry Digital
Coventry Digital is an online resource about the city of Coventry and represents aspects of the city through the years. It was created and is maintained by Coventry University as its commitment to UK CoC 2021.
At its simplest, the Coventry archive is a collection about Coventry, made up of documents, maps, photographs, sound and video. It can help to link people, places and times. With every photograph, film, document and video, there is a story to tell. Who are the people and the places, and what time does the asset speak of? To whom does the item belong? Who created it?
Cultural Data Projects
Working with Warwick Business School, data-related projects were commissioned and managed by Coventry City Council to analyse Coventry residents’ participation in UK CoC 2021 activities. These examined:
- ticketing and exit-survey data
- sentiment surveys, Coventry household survey and participation data
- ticketing data and residents’ cultural participation
- attitudes to Covid-19 and attendance at events.
What Data Tells Us About Coventry
In February 2022, the Coventry City of Culture Trust released What Data Tells Us About Coventry. Themes included:
- Demographics
- Cultural
- Education
- Employment
- Green Futures
- Gross Value Added (GvA)
- Health
- Tourism
- Young People.