Harnessing the power of research to learn and generate new insights, enabling the arts community to be strategic, focused and adaptive.

This is how we work

Countdown to the DNA Expo!

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Stay tuned for insights, reflections and materials from the DNA Expo!

Email [email protected] to be added to our list.

Join Mass Culture on November 28, 12-5pm Eastern for the online DNA Expo, when we will be launching the DNA Platform and offering opportunities to enhance your professional data practices through sessions on:

  • AI and Equitable Data
  • Data-minded Survey Building 

Take a stroll from here to there to encounter Mass Culture’s work and process:

Here

Creatively sharing knowledge
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There are benchmark moments when knowledge needs to be shared. However, as a learning organization, generating a report tends to signal the start of something rather than an end result. We also invest time in thinking about how to share information in ways that resonate with people. 

A great example is the poem written and recited by Luke Reece during the ASOs: Positioning a Future Forward event. Make your way back up to the top of the page to see what we mean by creatively sharing knowledge.

Screenshot of Gallery of Ideas from Airtable.

From our earliest beginnings, we have built up our knowledge base by creatively convening the arts community. This work sets our priorities and determines the issues that matter to the sector.  

Here is a gallery of challenges that we crowdsourced in 2022 in preparation of ASOs: Positioning a Future Forward.

Screenshot of Miro Research in Residence Reading Room.

For us, It is important to document, reflect and share our processes. Creating an evaluation framework early on in collaboration with the project's partners, establishes what we hope to learn and intentionally take time during the project to review and adapt. 

Click below to check out the Research in Residence: Arts' Civic Impact Evaluation Logbooks.

Artifex logo.

Knowledge, research and data exist all around us. We just feel the need to amplify and organize it in ways that feel digestible and relevant. In the past, we've hosted datathons to collect resources on particular topics so that we can house them in Artifex!

Click below to find out more about Artifex and share your resources to help it grow.

DNA Logo.

The relationships and connections that we have made with well over 1000 people who care about the arts is fundamental to doing this work well. When we talk about Infrastructure, Mass Culture's network is major part of what we are are referring to as well as some of the research tools we've been able to build in concert with arts community.

Our newest research tool is D.N.A's Arts Data Platform.

TRAIN logo.

As a way of sharing knowledge to strengthen the arts sector we host learning opportunities. The T.R.A.I.N program is our largest professional development program to date. We have lots of asynchronous learning materials from T.R.A.I.N here.

Providing training opportunities also enables us to share how to use the research tools that we've created. Find out more about the D.N.A Learning Series here.

Logo designed by Sariena Luy.

Parul Pandya is speaking into a microphone onstage, mid-conversation with Heather George, at Toronto Metropolitan Conversation during Mass Culture's Convergence in Winter 2023.

We are very curious and experimental when it comes to designing processes. Our community-based approach to research often leads us to co-developing some type of convening. We thoroughly enjoy working with others to understand how best to bring people together to achieve resonance, continued engagement, and potential future action.

An example of a creative convening approach: Mass Culture’s Play-Go-Rounds.

Photography by Sariena Luy & Jazmine Snow.

Images of the Research in Residence qualitative impact frameworks.

Research is a living thing. Although this linear representation of our work is ending, we continue to test and apply the emergent ideas and resources from our projects.

An example of this is the Qualitative Impact Frameworks developed through our Research in Residence: Arts' Civic Impact program. Currently, we are working with the researchers and arts organizations to implement and test the usefulness of these new tools to determine impact.

Travel back to the top to see the cycle begin again.

Art by Harmeet Rehal.

There

Getting from here to there is by no means linear. This is just for the purpose of being neat and tidy.

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