Number fascination
Our lives are full of numbers and metrics. The minutes you
need to boil an egg, the temperature outside, the hours until the end of the
workday, the hourly pay rate of your job, the recommended amount of salt in
your daily diet, the number of likes on your latest social media post. Numbers
help to make sense of what we think, feel and know. Everything can be measured,
once we learn how to count.
When you count things, you probably feel
achievement and success: the number of followers you have on social media, the
clicks on your latest post, and the number of steps you have taken this day.
But to know what decisions you need to make, good metrics and a clear
understanding of what is being measured are needed. If you can’t measure it,
you can’t manage it. Or can you?
This Number Fascination exhibition was part of
Me-Mind, a Creative Europe project that aims to measure and visualise the
effect of culture. Throughout the process, we’ve come up with great questions
about what measuring and counting mean, their challenges and the effect they
can have on people. The Me-Mind project has sought indicators that would help
to understand the socio-economic effect of cultural institutions and companies
and to look at the life cycle of data as a whole, from data collection and
analysis to visualisation. Also designed to enhance the value of cultural and
creative industries in terms of audience development, sustainable business
strategies and analysis of benefits and effects produced in a particular town
or region.
During the project, a number of guidelines were
created that provide tips for both beginners and advanced data enthusiasts to
facilitate working with data. Go to the Me-Mind project page or download the
tutorials here: https://www.memind.eu/.
Please ask yourself about your relationship with data
as you are going through the sections of the exhibition. All data sets should
be questioned by as many minds as possible.
Curators: Pille Runnel, Pille
Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Agnes Aljas
More information about the exhibition: https://www.erm.ee/en/content/number-fascination
Topics:
1. The origins of measuring - Click here
Old measuring tools
Using the body as a measuring tool
Using the body to count
Using data to understand the body
2. A quantified world - Click here
I track ...
3. The contrast of the digital everyday - Click here
Big data as a challenge
Big data as a promise
Data gathering and usage
4. A new way to approach data - Click here
Refreshing data
How can we measure culture?
Cultural experience as statistics