Read Laura Molloy's latest update on the research she is undertaking as part of her Knowledge Exchange Studentship at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and The Ruskin School of Art, supported by DACS.
Putting artists at the centre of the enquiry
As 2017 gets underway amidst a welter of bad news and scary disregard for the truth, I’m pleased to be bucking the trend with a determined effort to gather factual evidence for my project. In other words, the data gathering phase is now underway!
My project aims to place the working artist at the centre of the enquiry and find out what digital information means to their work, how important it is in their particular workflow and how confident they feel in performing their digital information handling tasks.
Interviews with DACS Payback members
In order to understand the artists’ perspectives, I am undertaking a raft of case-study length interviews across the UK. This benefits from my partnership with DACS. The DACS team is kindly working with me to identify a number of potential interview participants on the basis of their age bracket, and whether they are low, medium or high-level claimants from the
Payback scheme.
Given those factors, I then look at anonymised identifiers for each Payback scheme member artist and choose a sample of artists based on approximate location across the UK. This choice of location is to ensure two things: 1) representation from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales as well as from England; and 2) that as London and the Brighton area are the postcode districts with the largest number of Payback members, this weighting is reasonably represented in the sample.
At the end of the selection process, DACS writes out to the small group of selected artists and invites them to participate in an interview. Now that we have gone through this process and I’m in the process of working with our first cohort of artists, I’m delighted to report that those interviews I have undertaken so far have been just as absorbing, surprising and rich as I had hoped, and I’m hugely grateful to those artists who have been so generous with their thoughts and time.
Other ways to take part
However, I realise that not everyone who is invited as a result of this process will be able to participate, so once I have transcribed and begun analysis of the first raft of interviews, I’ll be looking out for more visual artists in contemporary practice to talk with. If you work in fine art, including sculpture, painting, printmaking, illustration or fine art photography, I’d be very happy to hear from you any time at
[email protected].
This article was originally published on Laura Molloy's blog for the Oxford Internet Institute
here.
Read Laura's previous update
Find out more about the Knowledge Exchange Studentship
Image: DACS member Tess Jaray's studio. Photo by Brian Benson © Brian Benson, 2017.