How do you feel about art and culture? You might know, but how can you transmit your feelings to arts and culture organisations accurately?

Qualia can help measure your mood after seeing a show, exhibition, installation or movie and is set to revolutionise the way in which feedback data is collected.

Evaluating audience feedback is a vital task for culture organisations, giving them important information that can support funding applications or direct future programming. Usually this is done with feedback forms that present culture fans with paperwork just after they’ve experienced a show or a performance.

Organisations may miss out on important data about how the event went down with audiences, because visitors didn’t complete their post-event ‘homework’.

Enter Qualia (stage right). This is i-DAT’s ground-breaking digital technology and research project, which measures the mood of arts and culture audiences using a user-friendly interface that ‘gamifies’ the evaluation process.

Qualia enables users to gain tangible rewards for taking part – such as discounts and exclusive offers – making data collection easy, fun and beneficial.

Meanwhile, venues, organisations and the arts and culture sector generally benefit by receiving accurate feedback that can only improve culture experiences.

Qualia ingredients include:

Web-Engine: Data capture and processing…

App: Personal scheduling and feedback mechanism…

Probes: Interactive information kiosks…

Realtime: festival management and audience flow…

Sentiment: Natural language processing to calculate mood and emotion…

Smile: Smile detection for live video feeds…

The analytics engine in Qualia has been collaboratively developed by i-DAT (Mike Phillips, B Aga, Chris Hunt, Dawn Melville) at Plymouth University with the audience evaluation researcher Eric Jensen of the University of Warwick, with designer Nathan Gale from Intercity and with Cheltenham Festivals 2013. The Qualia App was developed by Elixel.co.uk

It received funding from the prestigious Digital R&D Fund for the Arts, which is run by Nesta in partnership with Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Qualia has already powered digital evaluation processes for Cheltenham Jazz, Science, Music and Literature Festivals 2013, for Liverpool’s Flux Festival and it is set to underpin Plymouth’s new arts and culture app Artory.

Qualia is to be released as an Open Source platform, enabling the widest take-up and development of the technology.

“Traditional” approaches to assessing the impact of cultural events have focused on those metrics that are easy to measure, such as financial expenditure and business benefits. Qualia provides a more holistic approach to capturing the intangible impacts of cultural events, such as mood and engagement. It also provides a framework for a real-time responsive management of events.

The Qualia research and production approach has provoked new thinking about the provision of appropriate, sustainable and useful technological support for the cultural sector. Qualia provides a more negotiable business model that looks to recover closed outdated systems and provide access to more open and sustainable solutions for the sector.

Qualia Videos:

Some Qualia Videos of the App, Dashboard, Probes install and Visualisation:

Qualia App

Qualia Dashboard

Qualia Probe

Qualia Data Viz

Qualia Website:

As Qualia evolves and Quorum emerges we anticipate the http://qualia.org.uk/ website will have a limited lifespan. This is what it looked like:

QUALIA

INTRODUCING QUALIA

ABOUT QUALIA

Qualia is a ground-breaking digital technology and research project, which aims to revolutionize the way audience experiences at arts and culture events are evaluated. Incorporating mobile phone apps, information pods and online analytical tools Qualia can significantly enhance your audience evaluation techniques and improve engagement.

WHO NEEDS IT?

Take a journey through the Qualia system to diagnose your needs. Whether you run a festival, manage a museum or curate a gallery, Qualia’s open digital tools offer a sustainable model for capturing audience feedback and improving participation and engagement.

Qualia has been made available to the cultural sector through the GitHub hosting service and will be continued to developed and tailored in response to the communities needs.

WEB ENGINE

The Qualia Web Engine provides a secure environment for capturing and processing audience data. With the addition of the Qualia mobile phone app. Social networking analysis and other hardware and software installations the Web Engine can provide real time feed back on your audiences experience.

APP

The Qualia App is available for Android and iOS mobile phone users and allows visitors to schedule events and give feedback through tailored questions. Combined with additional Qualia audience tracing hardware and software Qualia tools can help map your venue and generate a real-time picture of the ‘mood’ of your audience.

SERVICES

The Qualia development team recognise that Open Source software can be a little tricky to install and support. We offer a range of services to help organisation tailor Qualia to meet their individual needs. Standard services for the culture sector non-profit organisations can be tailored and scaled for commercial organisations.

SYSTEM

WEB

The Qualia Web Engine is a sophisticated platform with an open API that can plug into a range of platforms, such as social media (Facebook and Twitter), ticketing (Eventbrite and Tessitura), geolocation (Google Maps). It can also scrape data from existing websites for easy access to scheduling data. The web engine provides:

Individual tailoring for arts organisations
Storage of all Qualia data
Real-time data processing
Analytics
Infographics
Social Media Sentiment Analysis

APP

The Qualia App for Android and iOS smart phones allows your audience to act as human sensors, feeding back real-time responses to your events and mapping the audience movement through your venue. The app provides:

Personalised event scheduling
Pre and post event feedback
Mood reporting
Social media feeds and individual posting
User demographics
Shared GPS mapping

ONSITE

Qualia also provides kiosk style ‘probe’ options. This touch screen facility includes:

larger screen presentation of schedules and events.
audience feedback through onscreen questionnaires.
audio monitoring around the probes.
Smile recognition software for capturing audience mood.
QR code and NFC ticket registration and tracking

Developed using Chrome apps Qualia Probes are highly adaptable and portable browser based additions which can be incorporated into tablets and desktop computers.

ANALYTICS

METRICS

How long is a piece of string? Traditional approaches to assessing the impact of cultural events have focused on those metrics that are more easily measurable such as financial expenditure and business benefits. Qualia provides a more holistic approach to capturing the intangible impacts of cultural events such as mood, feelings and engagement. It provides a mechanism for capturing and displaying complex data and audience feedback.

Qualia ‘harvests’ audience data from a range of sources, such as Social Networking API’s (such as Facebook and Twitter), venue ‘hotspots’ (audio monitoring, smile recognition and GPS tracking). Qualia captures qualitative metrics that provide feedback on how an audience ‘feels’.

Qualia will develop a greater understanding of the application of social media as a source of empirical data to inform the measurement of cultural impact.

Research findings will help to develop a greater understanding of the sometimes less tangible impacts of the arts on society. Alongside the technical development, the conceptual and methodological frameworks for measuring arts impacts using existing digital data will be developed. This project will generate a momentum that will help other arts organisations to deal with the challenges and opportunities of digitally interacting with their audiences.

QUESTIONS

Any analytical system is only as good as its data. Developing valid evaluation and feedback questions has been an essential aspect of the Qualia project. The Qualia platform incorporates carefully designed questions based on the state of the art in survey methodology.

In order to ensure that Qualia-generated evaluation data can be used with the most powerful statistical tests, Likert scale questions are used with a seven-point scale. Dr Eric Jensen has led the development of the evaluation questions and methodology. Jensen lectures on survey methodology and statistics at the University of Warwick

INFOGRAPHICS

Qualia was developed in collaboration with Nathan Gale at Intercity Studio. Commissioned to design the visual language underpinning the Qualia platform Nathan’s graphic protocols and colour coding run through all the Qualia tools and infographics.

ABOUT

CONTACT US

Start a conversation with the Qualia Team by emailing us at: contact@i-dat.org

SERVICES

Standard services for the culture sector non-profit organisations can be tailored and scaled for commercial organisations.

OPEN SOURCE

Qualia is available as an Open Source building blocks of code allowing organisations to install, modify and build on the code to construct their own systems (in accordance with the GNU GPL license.)

Qualia has been made available to the cultural sector through the GitHub hosting service and will be continued to developed and tailored in response to the communities needs.

PARTNERSHIP

Qualia is a ground-breaking new digital technology and research project, which aims to revolutionize the way audience experiences at arts and culture events are evaluated. The project will help us develop a greater understanding of the less tangible impacts of public engagement with arts and culture.

With funding from the prestigious Digital R&D Fund for the Arts, Qualia is developing new technology to enable the collection of audience profile information, live evaluation and feedback, and real-time measurement of impact indicators at arts and cultural events.

Cheltenham Festivals have hosted the development of the new Qualia app, which is being created by experts at Plymouth and Warwick universities. This project provides an opportunity for one of the foremost Festival organisations in the country to join forces with leading digital technology experts at Plymouth and evaluation and impact researchers from Warwick to look at how new technological developments can help us serve our audiences better. The ultimate aim is to create a transferable evaluation tool that allows arts and culture organisations to programme cultural events and on-going activities based on robust, real-time knowledge about audience responses, thereby enhancing the sector’s economic, cultural and social impact.

The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts is run by Nesta in partnership with Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. More details of the Fund and other projects in the scheme can be found here.

CHELTENHAM FESTIVALS

Cheltenham Festivals is a National Portfolio Organisation. Each year we create four nationally significant festivals Jazz, Science, Music &Literature as well as delivering a year round education programme. Over the course of the year we engage with approximately 1,200 speakers, writers, artists and musicians and attract over 200,000 people to events.

i-DAT

i-DAT is a lab for creative research, experimentation and innovation across the fields of digital Art, Science and Technology, generating social, economic and cultural benefit. Located within the Faculty of Arts at Plymouth University, it has been delivering high quality and experimental national and international arts and cultural activities since 1998.

UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

The University of Warwick is consistently rated as one of the top UK universities, with sociology ranked 3rd by the Guardian for 2013, Within the sociology department, key research priorities include: Culture, Media and Representation and Public Engagement.

INTERCITY STUDIO

ELIXEL

The Qualia App was developed and published in collaboration with Elixel. Qualia and Elixel have an agreement to further develop and tailor the Qualia App for a variety of applications.

GITHUB:

Qualia code is available on GITHUB: https://github.com/i-dat-qualia

Qualia App:

The Qualia App was available through Google Play and the Apple Store:

Geo Location:

The real-time flow of audiences allows responsive event management:

Qualia Probe:

Qualia Probes are sensing ‘pods’ placed strategically around the event site. The Qualia Probes provide a focus for public interaction, providing feedback to visitors through dynamic visualisations, information.

Capturing real-time information the probes add another layer of mood sensing to the Qualia landscape. The Probes are fitted with a touch screen to provide easy access to festival information and to record audio and images for the Qualia system. During the Cheltenham Festivals they were installed in Montpellier Gardens, Gloucester Cathedral, Parabola Arts Centre, and Pittville Pump Room. Each Probe is equipped with:

Information: The probe provides access to the Qualia Web engine that provides visitor information and allows annotations and blog submissions.

Eye: The Qualia Eye acts as a visitor counter, measuring the flow of people and mood through the integration of a smile recognition counter and image capture. Users can record and annotate images of their experiences at the festival

Ear: The Qualia Ear allows visitors to record their feedback on the event. It also measures audio levels to understand the ambient hum of the event.

Qualia Visualizer: The visualizer displays the rich dynamic data visualisations from the Qualia System on the Probe screen.

Social Network Harvesting: The probe provides live feeds of the harvesting of data (comments and news) from social networking generated around the festival.

Push notifications: Information from event organisers can be pushed to the probes to provide up-to-date information.

Qualia Smile:

“Start every day off with a smile and get it over with.”

W. C. Fields

‘Qualia Smile’ is a playful smile counter that encourages the audience to participate in measuring the collective happiness of the Jazz Festival. Qualia Smile gamifies the collection of qualitative data, generating a benevolent feedback loop – smile and the festival smiles with you. The harvested smiles generate an aggregated visualisation of the mood of the festival – that Jazz feeling.

Qualia Smile incorporates image analysis techniques found in most common cameras and phones. These open software libraries are used to create a playful and participatory measure of happiness at the Jazz Festival. If this were a Blues Festival, would we have to turn the camera upside down?

Qualia Smile works within one meter of the display screen and requires direct participation. The system only records instances of smiles and not individual faces. The smile harvesting takes place in real time and is layered over the live video. Just like a mirror, the screen clearly shows who is looking at it and encourages the viewer to pull appropriate faces (commonly called ‘smiles’). The dynamic data graphics visualise that Jazz feeling.

Variables: Qualia Smile recognised variables in smile shape between a more or less horizontal line of the mouth to a range of an upward curve (smile). It did not measure negative curves (frowns). When smiles were detected the modified OpenCV software gave a value of intensity for that smile (a generic value created by the openCV software for comparative analysis, based around the size of the detected smile and the certainty it is a smile). When the intensity value exceeded a small threshold for a few seconds, this was logged as a smile instance with a timestamp.

[NB: This is not a ‘face recognition’ system, it captures shapes, it is digital pareidolia:-)]

Qualia Workshops:

Qualia is built on a set of relationships with partners, stakeholders and audiences, these include:

Qualia Design Workshop:

i-DAT: 12/8/2013. The purpose of this workshop is to reflect on the Qualia NESTA proposal and deliverables, share, critique and assess recent activities and provide a critical framework for the design delivery for the Literature Festival in October. Participants: Cheltenham Festivals / i-DAT/ Warwick University / Nathan Gale (Intercity) Elixel / Researchers from i-DAT and Plymouth community.

Qualia Design Presentation / Qualia Tech Presentation / Qualia Visuals Presentation

Qualia Cheltenham Festival:

Using Digital Technology for Evaluation: the Qualia Project:
The Conservatory at the Queen’s Hotel, Cheltenham. 10/10/2014. Cheltenham Literature Festival. We are running a workshop for practitioners during the Literature Festival to talk about the Qualia project and its findings to date, offering a first look at this new technology before it launches publicly. The aim is to release the technologies in the future as open source and provide a comprehensive set of open tools to measure impact and engagement.

Qualia Capture the Rapture:

Qualia was presented at a Tate Britain staff development workshop. Also the British Arts Festival Association ‘Ask the Experts Roadshow’ at the C ambridge Literary Festival in the Cambridge Union Society. (04/04/2014) and ACCESS ALL AREAS: Development. The BAFA Spring Road Show #BAFA14RS. Theatres Trust, London. 25/04/2014.

Qualia @ the AHRC:

AHRC Creative Economy Showcase. 12/03/2014. King’s Place Conference Centre, 90 York Way, London, N1 9AG. The UK’s Creative Economy – embracing the creative industries and the cultural sector – is a dynamic and vital part of our economy…. Complex, rich in its diversity and characterised by great differences of scale, the sector ranges from major corporations to small and micro enterprises…

Qualia Designs:

Qualia design work by Intercity/Elixel/i-DAT: