Many of the datasets we have are about arts nonprofits, arts education, artworks, and grants, but there is also a fair amount of data available about arts finance, mostly in the nonprofit realm.
Data Tools
A wide variety of tools are available to analyze and visualize arts data. Below are links to some of the most popular.
Numbers
-
Excel
- Excel is a spreadsheet program that features calculation, graph tools and pivot tables. It is the industry standard for spreadsheets and is part of the Microsoft Office suite of programs. Excel is great for storing, sorting and calculating descriptive statistics, and its capacity for data visualization is expanding. One advantage of using Excel is that is is so widely distributed and used. It’s probably on your computer now.
-
Socrata
- Socrata describes itself as “a cloud-based data democratization solution for government.” Its software-as-a-service data platform and cloud applications is used by many city, county, state, and federal government organizations, helping them make their data available to the public. Socrata’s web-based tools can be used to view, graph, map and download datasets provided by governments. LA County and the City of LA both make data publicly available through Socrata, as do other cities in the region.
-
Tableau
- Tableau is an online tool that helps you produce interactive data visualizations. They focus on what’s called “business intelligence” but their tools can be used by anyone, to create a variety of types of interactive charts and graphs.
-
R
- R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. R provides a wide variety of statistical such as linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification and clustering as well as graphical tools, and is highly extensible. R is available as Free Software under the terms of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License in source code form. One of R’s strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed.
-
Pandas
- pandas is an open source, BSD-licensed library providing high-performance, easy-to-use data structures and data analysis tools for the Python programming language. With pandas you can carry out your entire data analysis workflow in Python without having to switch to a more domain specific language like R. It is primarily useful for linear and panel regression modeling.
-
AirTable
- Something of a hybrid between Excel and Access, but in the cloud. Unlike either of those programs it easily handles images, links and snazzy color coding.
Words/Textual Analysis
-
Nvivo
- Nvivo is a qualitative data analysis tool for coding and analyzing text, images, audio, video and other unstructured data, somewhat similar to Dedoose. A free trial version is available.
-
Dedoose
- Dedoose is a web-based application that can be used to code and analyze text, images, audio, videos and spreadsheet data. Otherwise known as a type of qualitative data analysis (QDA) software. A free trial version is available.
-
Google Books Ngram Viewer
- When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g.,
British English,
English Fiction,
French
) over the selected years. -
Infographics
- A wide variety of tools are available online for creating infographics. These are less about analyzing data and more about presenting it in an attractive and human-understandable format. Both of the tools listed below have free versions available.
Read more about do-it-yourself infographic tools on Contently.com
-
Canva
-
Piktochart
Downloadable Data
-
Museums in LA County
- LA County is home to at least 226 museums. This list of LA County museums is a curated subset of a crowdsourced list of museums created by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This is the most complete list of museums in the County, but there may be other, smaller museums that are not included.
-
Urban Art in West Hollywood
- The City of West Hollywood’s Percent for Art Program includes works by Billy Al Bengston, Shepard Fairey, and Ball-Nogues. Over 60 artworks are included in this dataset with links to photos for each artwork.
-
LA County Civic Art Collection
- Art and Culture's Civic Art Program was established in 2004 after the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors adopted the County’s first Civic Art Policy, which allocates one percent of design and construction costs of new County capital projects to a Civic Art Special fund. The County Civic Art Collection includes artworks accessioned through capital project commissions, donations, purchases, and historic artworks acquired by the County prior to the adoption of the Civic Art Policy. The dataset includes artist name, artwork title, location (geocoded and addresses), medium, artwork type, and creation date. Images are not included in the dataset.
-
Libraries in the United States
- This database provides basic information about every main library, branch and bookmobile in the US. If you only want to see LA County, set the
filter
function so that COUNTY is LOS ANGELES. There are 37 library systems in LA County. -
Circulation Statistics, LA County Libraries
- How many books are checked out or renewed from each library every month? This dataset provides the answer, dating back to 2014. This includes County libraries only and does not include the City of LA’s library data or any of the other 36 library systems in the County.
-
Bookstores in LA County
- This is the most complete list of bookstores in LA County available, compiled in 2013 from a mix of websites, social media and crowdsourced data. Bookstores open and close with some regularity so this list is likely to be slightly out of date.
-
Arts Nonprofits in California - Revenue Sources
- This dataset shows revenue by all sources for all arts nonprofits in California. This is a very large file that includes a significant amount of contextual data. Use the codebook in the second tab to help you understand the headers. The data have been anonymized to protect confidentiality. This dataset is limited to those arts nonprofits that report data to DataArts.
-
Arts Nonprofits in the US - Event Attendance
- This dataset shows attendance by discipline for arts nonprofits in every county in the US that reports Cultural Data Profiles to DataArts. It shows both paid and free attendance, and covers the years 2002-2016. Organizations can be sorted by budget size and by discipline as well as zip code. The data have been anonymized to protect confidentiality. This dataset is limited to those arts nonprofits that report data to DataArts.
-
Grantees of City of Los Angeles Cultural Grants Program
- This is a list nonprofit cultural-arts organizations awarded with financial support for public-benefit projects taking place within the City of Los Angeles. The Cultural Grants Program is administered by the Grants Division of the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. This list contains the name and address of the organizational grantee, discipline of the project proposed, and grant amount allocation from fiscal year 2010-11 to 2016-17. This workbook contains tabs for a spreadsheet per fiscal year cycle.
-
Grantees of LA County's Organizational Grant Program
- This is a list of arts nonprofit organizations in LA County awarded two-year grants by the Organizational Grants Program (OGP), managed by the Arts and Culture. Each organization listed received a two-year grant. For each grantee, the organization name, award amount, project description and website is provided. This dataset shows the most recent three years of awards.
-
Grantees of LA County's Community Impact Arts Grant
- The Community Impact Arts Grant (CIAG) program recognizes the value of the arts as a vital tool for cross-sector and civic problem solving across a range of issue areas. The program supports arts programming taking place at nonprofit social service and social justice organizations, municipal departments, and institutions of higher education as part of larger missions to provide services to individuals and communities, and enables these organizations to deliver a wide variety of cultural services to County residents that support arts and culture throughout the region.
-
Community Arts Centers, City of Los Angeles
- A list of the 22 cultural centers, theaters, historic sites, and galleries managed by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA). Administered by the Community Arts Division, these cultural centers have year-round classes, workshops, exhibitions, and events; and engage in conservation efforts and educational tours at historical sites.
-
LA County's Free Summer Concerts Program
- Each summer the LA County Board of Supervisors funds free concerts in public sites across LA County.
-
LA County Arts Ed Profile
- The LA County Arts Education Profile survey was administered to all 2,277 public schools in LA County to learn about the quantity, quality and equity of arts education. We found that nearly every school offers at least some arts instruction, and most schools offer at least two disciplines. At the same time, we found troubling inequities that reflect disparities in the wider society.
-
Arts Education - Advancement Grant for School Districts
- LA County’s Advancement Grant program offers financial support to school districts in the County, aiming to provide quality arts education for public school students. Grant funds assist school districts in achieving key action items in their district arts plans, and cultivating skills and practices that can be sustained beyond the term of the grant.
-
Arts Equity Index in LAUSD Schools
- The Arts Equity Index (AEI) categorizes all LAUSD schools (K-12) based on the scope of their provided arts instruction, arts resources, arts professional development, Title 1 Status, and Student Equity Index (Poverty, Foster Students, English Language Learners). This dataset is limited to schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
-
Employment: Creative Industries in LA County
- These datasets present information about employment in creative industries in LA County, using North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) codes and definitions developed in the annual Otis Report on the Creative Economy. The data include the count of workers in each industry in LA County by race, gender, and age, as well as the number of people working in those industries and their hourly earnings. Comparison data for creative industries in the entire US are provided in a separate workbook. Data showing race, gender, and age for all residents of LA County are also provided. The fourth dataset shows employment in creative industries by zip code. These data come from Economic Modeling Specialist International and are based on their proprietary model of aggregating data from over 100 sources.
County Creative Industries in the US Demographics: LA County Creative Industries by zip code
-
Employment: Creative Occupations in LA County
- These datasets present information about employment creative occupations in LA County, using occupational codes developed by the US Department of Labor and definitions developed in the annual Otis Report on the Creative Economy. These are occupations that require some kind of creativity, but may be in any industry. The data include the count of workers in each occupation in LA County by race, gender, and age, as well as the number of people working in those occupations and their hourly earnings. Comparison data for the creative occupations in the entire US are provided in a separate workbook. Data showing race, gender, and age for all residents of LA County are also provided. The fourth dataset shows employment in creative occupations by zip code. These data come from Economic Modeling Specialist International and are based on their proprietary model of aggregating data from over 100 sources.
Creative occupations in LA County Creative occupations in the US Demographics of LA County Creative occupations by zip code
-
Arts Ticket Buyers in LA County
- TRG Arts compiles information about ticket buyers from arts institutions in LA County, then combines that with more than 200 demographic and psychographic metrics, to construct profiles of arts patrons. The first dataset below is a demographic profile—age, education, income, presence of children, and other key metrics—in statistical and chart format. The second dataset looks at ticket buyers by zip code. It shows the penetration rate, which is the ratio of household count to the overall population in each postal code. The data is also represented in two postal code maps which can be found on the first two pages of the report. This data is limited to arts organizations that contribute data to TRG Arts; these range in annual budget size from $500,000 up to more than $12 million.
Creative occupations in LA County Creative occupations in the US
-
Los Angeles Indices of Neighborhood Change
- The Los Angeles Indices of Neighborhood Change is a project of the Los Angeles Innovation Team, as part of its wider efforts to develop City programs to reduce displacement in revitalizing areas of Los Angeles. From our link, you can download the underlying data (table and shapefiles) and a data dictionary related to the below metrics developed to rank neighborhood change and displacement pressure: 1) the Los Angeles Index of Neighborhood Change, a measure that combines comparative change among six demographic factors from 2000 to 2014, at the Zip Code level; 2) The Los Angeles Index of Displacement Pressure, a score of a Census Tract’s “displacement pressure,” as determined by predictive factors that suggest future revitalization, as well as the current population’s sensitivity to extreme rent increases.
-
National Center for the Arts KIPI Dashboard
- The National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) at Southern Methodist University (SMU) has created a free, online tool, the NCAR KIPI (Key Intangible Performance Indicator) Dashboard, which allows arts organizations across the U.S. to see how they compare to their peers. This dashboard, powered by data from DataArts’ Cultural Data Profile (CDP), illuminates organizations’ performance trends across nine key areas, and provides a KIPI score, ranging from 0-100, so organizations have an idea of their overall financial and operating health relative to similar organizations nationally. If you are from an arts organization that enters data into the CDP, you can look up your organization and compare it to others of the same size in the same discipline.
-
California Arts Education Data Project
- How much arts education is provided in schools across the 81 school districts in LA County? What classes are offered, and how many students enroll? This interactive dashboard is a project of CreateCA (built with Tableau) that allows you to look up the data by county, by district and by school. This is data reported each year to the California Department of Education. Keep in mind, this only reflects individual arts classes so it only shows secondary education. Also, you can’t download the data to create your own carts and graphs.
-
Public Art Archive
- A crowdsourced database of publicly viewable and sanctioned artworks that were commissioned, placed or displayed through a traditional commissioning process, or acquired through an official acquisition process. The site is maintained by the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF) and all entries are screened before being added. Description of each artwork is accompanied by an image. Because this is crowdsourced, it is an incomplete picture of public art. Searchable by location and other factors, and includes a mapping function.
-
AARP Livability Index
- Dataset
-
Revision Regional Mapping and Analysis Application (UCLA/SCAG)
- Dataset
-
Healthy City
- Dataset