This chapter takes a closer look at the case of Amsterdam as a particular manifestation of a film festival city. Drawing from a new dataset on festivals in the Netherlands, the data supports the view of film festivals as a highly dynamic cultural sector: Internationally acclaimed film festivals exist beside smaller festivals that are more community bound; new festivals emerge annually, and young festivals struggle to survive the three-to-five-year mark.Amsterdam holds a unique position in the Dutch film festival landscape as a third of all film festivals in the Netherlands take place in the capital city. Our data collection helps to bring parts of the city’s film infrastructure to the forefront. On the one hand, Amsterdam’s top five locations for film festival events show clear creative cities logic: The data shows just how powerful the pull of such locations is. On the other hand, we find evidence of placemaking and livable city strategies: Amsterdam’s film festivals extend into the capillaries of the city.Dedicated festival datasets may cast new perspectives on local or national festival landscapes, by revealing patterns that remain hidden in qualitative and case-study based projects. But there are also challenges to address in data-driven research on festival cultures, we name a few such as categorization of data. We conclude that such challenges can be more easily faced if more datasets, of for instance, other cities, are pursued and become available.
MULTIFILE
In January 2008 the online photo-hosting site Flickr introduced a new section entitled The Commons. Its two key goals were to show the hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives to the general public and to give Flickr community members the opportunity to contribute and describe these photos in order to enrich these collections. Surprisingly enough, little empirical research has been done on the actual usage of The Commons by the institutes and Flickr members. In our research we harvested a rich data sample over a 14-week period: 196,822 photos with user-generated content of 1.3 million tags, almost 130,000 comments and more than 22,000 notes. In total, 165,401 members from 188 different countries actively “did something” with the photos. This presentation will analyze this large data sample. In addition to the quantitative findings, we will discuss the qualitative findings regarding the content analysis of tags and comments.
