Report on the representations of cultural value in cultural information systems

In the overall rationale of the UNCHARTED project, cultural information systems serve the crucial role of providing input to policy makers, who on that basis try to steer the actions of organizations in the field of cultural production and heritage management. Thus, the construction of cultural information systems and their implementation marks a key phase to understand how change is triggered and what values inform transformation in the field of cultural production and heritage management. In this report, cases are grouped in pairs to have a better understanding of these dynamics. The first group of case studies (4.1 and 4.2) looks at the statistics published annually by regional and national observatories to detect the kind of information collected, especially their quality and availability. Taking a perspective focusing on the content, they analyse how cultural observatories structure and categorize their datasets, in order to clarify to what degree a plurality of values is covered. The main methodological approach for this pair of cases is documentary analysis, supplemented by interviews to understand the rationale behind thematic and methodological choices. The second pair of cases (4.3 and 4.4) looks at the ranking of municipal (Norway) and museal (Italy) cultural production and consumption. This pair of cases takes a processual perspective to focus on the activities and value-related issues taking place once the data collection strategy is designed and rolled out. By taking such a process perspective, this second pair of cases allows us to understand the initial configurations of values underlying the implementation of information systems and how these are re-conciliated, along with underlying tensions and conflicts between the different actors. The methodology for this pair of cases is observation, both participant (4.3) and non-participant (4.4), in-depth interviews and documentary analysis. Both pairs of cases illustrate how the value dynamics and the plurality of values detected in WP1 and WP2 are here combined into uniform criteria of evaluation. As stated, Topic 4 analysis will be enriched by insights coming from cases performed under Topic 1- 3. On that note, this Topic can provide valuable insights for WP4 analysis, since all the cases described above fit well into a preliminary assessment of how cultural values can inform cultural policies at both regional and national level. In the following, for each case, we introduce its background and the methodology used. Then we move on to detail the valuation grammars identified and types of tensions in valuation and their dynamics. Due to the structure of the first two cases, the valuation grammar here is detailed through the concepts of data availability and quality, categorization, and scope of coverage. In the second pair of cases the valuation grammar is detailed after the findings, through the sections focusing on the systems of evaluation, the tensions and their dynamics. After each pair of cases, a pairwise comparison analyzes the key issues emerging from the cases. in the final section we compare the underpinnings of these pairwise analyses by discussing critically their topic-level implications.