Does data make sense at a festival? Well, yes.
A festival is the perfect microcosm of a complex modern city, it generates immense amounts of data generated from geospatial, social media and a multitude of other sources.
An event like a festival can be considered as an "anthropological place", opposed to the concept of non-place, a word coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé to refer to anthropological spaces of transience where the human beings remain anonymous. The place, instead, offers people a space that empowers their identity, where they can meet other people with whom they share social references.
Case study: Roskilde Festival
Copenhagen Business School recognized that the local Roskilde Festival could act as a controlled environment for research into major issues affecting urban populations. The school partnered with IBM (focused on AI and machine learning) and the festival to give festival-goers the best experience possible using real-time analytics.
At the top level, the project intends to look at topics such as:
The movement of crowds throughout the event
The sales of food and beverages over time
The popularity of different musical events
Data in motion:
Information took shape: The sale of food and average over time, the popularity of the various artists, the usage of bathroom facilities and parking, and so on created a comprehensive view of what was happening at the festival. One of the ways that they are using data is determining which artists to book next year, by tracking how many people went to an artist’s performance and how many stayed following the previous act by putting sensors at entrances to tents.
Real-time, operational decisions:
By making this wealth of data accessible to non-data scientists, the Festival gained insights enabling better operational decisions that will minimize food waste, improve security, and optimize the festival experience.
The process they used is quite similar to ours, they started by collecting data with .csv files and by using GPS tracking system, they then elaborated them through different platforms (we used Bluemix Services too during two of our workshops). Once the data were ready for a proper analysis they used different visualization services to show the final results.