A virtuous circle: the positive evaluation phenomenon in arts audience research
Arts impact evaluation is the subject of widespread criticism, ranging from a detailed critique of methodology to a wholesale rejection of the very purpose of the endeavour. In particular, it is often identified that audience evaluations are almost always positive. Yet whatever the critique, arts impact evaluation is becoming more and not less prevalent as a condition of public and philanthropic funding. This article explores both the methodological and conceptual problems that contribute to the perceived positive character of social impact research, in two parts: (1) an investigation of the critical literature on audience evaluation, particularly in relation to the argument that evaluation is inevitably positive and as such leads to a confusion between the goals of evaluation and arts advocacy; (2) a reflection on our practices as audience researchers in the performing arts and the practical factors that contribute to the dominance of the positive in audience evaluation.
Accounting for quality: arts evaluation, public value and the case of “Culture counts”
ABSTRACT Arts policy has a longstanding relationship with the concept of “quality” and the ways in which organisations measure, evaluate and account for it. Culture Counts, an evaluation system and digital platform, compiles data from standardised evaluation surveys of different stakeholder groups – organisations, audiences, critics, funders and peers – and provides the means to compare and triangulate data in an accessible format. As a result, it claims to provide a more effective, democratic tool for quality measurement of art, which demonstrates the public value of funding [Department of Culture and the Arts, & Knell, J. (2014). Public value measurement framework: Measuring the quality of the arts. Perth: Department of Culture and the Arts.]. Through qualitative research with two consortia of organisations involved in Culture Counts pilot projects in Manchester, England and Victoria, Australia, we explore these claims, comparing the reception and promotion of the system in both countries and considering its potential incorporation into policy assessment frameworks and adoption within arts organisations’ existing evaluation capacities.
Detection and Counting of On-Tree Citrus Fruit for Crop Yield Estimation
In this paper, we present a technique to estimate citrus fruit yield from the tree images. Manually counting the fruit for yield estimation for marketing and other managerial tasks is time consuming and requires human resources, which do not always come cheap. Different approaches have been used for the said purpose, yet separation of fruit from its background poses challenges, and renders the exercise inaccurate. In this paper, we use k-means segmentation for recognition of fruit, which segments the image accurately thus enabling more accurate yield estimation. We created a dataset containing 83 tree images with 4001 citrus fruits from three different fields. We are able to detect the on-tree fruits with an accuracy of 91.3%. In addition, we find a strong correlation between the manual and the automated fruit count by getting coefficients of determination R2 up to 0.99.