Mapping the Media Arts Field
Grantmakers, please click the link below to request additional information about this project or to invite the project manager to submit a formal application to your foundation.
Contact the project managers >>
Images
Topics:
Broadband/Internet, Community networking, Media Arts Centers, Public Infrastructure & Access, Radio, TV, Universal Access, VOIP/Telephony/Phones, Wireless Networks
Target Audience:
government agencies, NAMAC member organizations and their stakeholders, philanthropic community, researchers
Geographic Area:
Budget
Raised to date: $ 90,000.00
Estimate to complete: $ 195,000.00
Total Estimated Budget: $ 285,000.00
The budget numbers above are accurate as of 01/08/2009
Key Personnel
Jack Walsh
Co-Director
Jack Walsh has a life-long commitment to independent media and supporting the organizations that work on behalf of independent film and video makers. Before joining NAMAC he worked as the Capital Campaign Manger for the 9th Street Independent Film Center, an innovative cross-sector collaboration for the purchase and renovation of a building that houses eight nonprofit media arts organization including NAMAC. During the Campaign’s Phase 1, he raised $2.6 M of the total $6.4M project budget.
Prior to that, Jack worked as an Executive Producer in national productions for San Francisco’s public television station KQED. His documentary and then one night: The Making of Dead Man Walking, aired nationally on PBS in January 2002. The program received a Northern California Emmy for Cultural Affairs Program in 2002, and a national News and Documentary Emmy Nomination for Outstanding Cultural and Artistic Program, 2003. His series Independent View, a 17-part program about independent film, aired nationally on PBS in the fall of 2001 and winter of 2002. In the mid-nineties, Jack was the Series Producer of the Living Room Festival an innovative public television series collaboration between the Bay Area’s media arts community and KQED, which aired for four seasons.
As an independent producer, Jack produced Hope Along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay, (PBS 2003), Girl Trouble, (PBS’s Independent Lens 2006), and Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, which premiered nationally on PBS in June 2006 and won the 2006 Northern California Emmy for Historical/Cultural Program. His film The Lost Generation received the Documentary Jury Prize at the Athens International Film and Video Festival in 2005.
Funders
| Name | Amount | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Nathan Cummings Foundation | $ 20,000.00 | 05/01/2007 | |
| The Tides Foundation | $ 30,000.00 | 03/30/2007 | |
| The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation | $ 30,000.00 | 10/20/2006 | |
| National Endowment for the Arts | $ 10,000.00 | 06/01/2006 |
Short Synopsis
Mapping the Media Arts Field will capture empirical data about the public interest media field and serve as a baseline assessment of the field’s economic, community, and creative indicators. The resulting comprehensive national census, which will live as a searchable tool on NAMAC’s website, will allow NAMAC and our member organizations to begin building the evidentiary case for the field’s value and impact.
Description/Treatment
In 2006, NAMAC completed an extensive R&D phase for Mapping the Media Arts Field, the first phase of our national census of the public interest media field. During that phase, we convened 49 organizations nationwide to develop the survey questions, hired the Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology at Iowa State University to craft the survey instrument, vetted the instrument with peer intermediary organizations at a focus group in Philadelphia, and modified the survey as a result of feedback provided by our peers.
NAMAC currently seeks support to conduct this national survey, perhaps more important now than ever before, to create the first baseline assessment of the public sector's media technology infrastructure and its impact on economic and community development. Mapping the Media Arts Field’s remaining phases include the following:
PHASE 2: DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
In Phase 2, we will begin to collect data. The preparatory tasks still ahead in this phase include converting the survey into a Web format, creating a wide survey pool, and promoting fieldwide participation through outreach and education. We will then conduct the data collection across twelve weeks and tabulate the results, preparing ourselves for the Phase 3 launch of the project’s database.
Data Collection
In continued association with the Iowa State University Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology (CSSM), we will prepare for and undertake data collection across four stages:
- Survey Finalization. First, CSSM will finalize the survey questionnaire to be used for collecting information. This stage will be undertaken in consultation with NAMAC representatives and affiliates and Web design programmers, and take into account specific programming and implementation requirements.
- Survey Programming. Second, CSSM will test the survey questionnaire, develop security procedures, and identify hosting/database requirements, once again with feedback on design and performance from NAMAC representatives and affiliates.
- Data Collection. Third, CSSM will prepare the initial survey and materials, distribute multiple notification/reminder mailings, check and process referrals in the sample expansion, monitor Web survey progress, edit and clean survey data, and prepare progress reports throughout the data collection process. The activity involved in mailings and sample expansion requires the largest portion of labor in this project. We anticipate an initial sample of 900 organizations, each of which will receive a survey notification letter, including a description of the project and an invitation to participate in the survey, and up to two reminder letters.
- Database Development. The data collection phase will end with the development of a searchable database available to all users, as well as a customized database available only to participating organizations for the purpose of viewing and updating their own information and comparing their organization with groups of others. In both cases, the database will be designed to be secure and easily accessed, updated, and adapted. It will provide information in a clear and understandable way.
Analysis
To help those within and outside of the media arts field understand the implications of the collected information, we will publish an analysis of the data in our publication, "A Closer Look." Tom Borrup, a leader and innovator in cultural and community development work for over twenty-five years, will analyze the data through the lens of economic development. Roberto Bedoya, known for his longstanding work with visual arts organizations, and more recently for his research and writing about America’s cultural policy landscape, will approach the data as a tool for developing cultural policy.
Economic Development. Tom Borrup’s analysis will help NAMAC bring the media arts into the national dialogue about community-based economic development and industry innovation efforts - a dialogue in which the arts and culture sector has asserted itself as a major force. Others sectors have been steadily at work. Advocates have produced reports and economic impact studies. Economists and sociologists have analyzed correlations and causal relationships. Planners and policymakers have jumped on the bandwagon. Politicians have built reputations on creative economies, creative clusters, cool cities, and cultural tourism. While the media arts are late in coming to the table, the Obama administration’s desire to build out 21st century technologies as a tool of economic development could not be more fortuitous for our sector. For year’s NAMAC organizations’ relevance to their communities included serving as the training centers for new technologies, serving at-risk populations usually denied access to media tools, and creating community-based exhibition venues – either face-to-face or through public access cable stations – to create media that tells stories often overlooked by mainstream media. What we have lacked is the language, tools, and comfort level necessary to participate fully in the economic development dialogue.
Our field-mapping effort will collect and analyze data to help the field better understand its own assets, capacities, and potential with regard to economic development. The data, as analyzed by Borrup, will provide information from which local and national action plans can be devised to build the field’s assets and to strategically position it to have greater impact on the artists and communities it serves. We will begin to familiarize ourselves with the language and vocabulary used by the economic development sector and identify the asset-based building blocks through which we can construct strategies to strengthen the role of media arts and media arts centers in both community and industry-based economic development.
Cultural Policy. Roberto Bedoya will draw on the data to create a series of training workshops and a toolkit to help organizations in the field advance local, regional and national public policy agendas. We will integrate the training workshops into our leadership development program as well as in our regional meetings, national conference, and other of our services.
Central to the training program will be a policy manual, a “policy primer” written by Bedoya to provide an overview of the development of U.S. cultural policies, define policy terms, explain research methodologies, and demonstrate how to use the data to forge a policy agenda and craft policymaking arguments with a focus on stakeholder analysis. The policy manual and trainings are part of a larger blueprint for how and where NAMAC and its members can strategically insert themselves in cultural and public policymaking activities to assure that they are democratic, inclusive, and advance NAMAC’s national work and the local and regional work of our constituent organizations.
The cultural policy analysis will position our field to enter into cultural policy debates, resourced with comprehensive and reliable information about our members and the media arts field. We will be able to leverage this knowledge by forming partnerships around national cultural policy projects with cultural policy researchers, think-tank organizations, and other arts service organizations. Beyond the cultural sector, our work with such other policy sectors as education, workforce development, and social justice will be deepened through the use of the Mapping the Media Arts Field findings.
PHASE 3: DISSEMINATION
In the final phase of the Mapping the Media Arts Field project, we will disseminate the collected data and publish the analyses of the data as it connects the media arts to cultural policy, economic development, and community engagement. The full survey results will be made available online as an interactive, searchable, and updateable database. Supplementing the database will be Web-based toolkits for use in workshops and regional meetings to develop policy leadership and arm a new generation of leaders with the knowledge they will need to help shape policy at local, regional, and national levels. The data analyses will be published in a special edition of A Closer Look, accompanied by case studies of centers that are today providing models of how the media arts will figure into the lives of communities and a globally interconnected world of the future.