Page 143 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

But the term also refers to an explosion of software for organised storage, managing large databases and sophisticated analysis, including viewing cross-data to detect new knowledge with respect to managing the elds that the organisation covers.On a practical level, organisations can come across a lot of information in their day-to-day running (it all depends on the type of activities they engage in and their size). For example, many festivals with a website use web analytics tools to measure variables such as how many users visit their digital spaces, which content receives the most visits and how long for, what theyclick on from the homepage... Basically, these tools reveal information that can be very useful for measuring development. The best known is Google Analytics, which has been used for years by many organisations as part of their monthly or quarterly management analysis routine.For example, in 2015 the International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia began to use new tracking tools from the ticket purchase stage onwards. This has enabled the organisers to produce more relevant newsletters targeted at speci c segments of followers depending on their interests.However, this is not necessarily Big Data – it would only fall into this category if there were very many di erent variables along with very many visits (not thousands but dozens or hundreds of thousands daily). It is therefore more usual for Big Data to be generated only by high-pro le festivals, for example.Analytics tools can be interesting at many levels, regardless of whether they produce or store a large or small amount of data. As we saw with Bonnaroo and its app, the festival was able to use a programme to view in real time where the largest concentrations of people were locatedin order to respond in time to overcrowding, making use of their system of beacons combined with apps.At its past 2013 edition, Sónar Festival used real-time analytics for a di erent purpose – awareness raising – to emphasise the constant tracking to which we can be subjected, especially how relatively easy it is to analyse in uxes of people and the areas through which they circulate by extracting information from the MAC address of festival goers’ mobile devicesby means of sensors stationed in the areas of Sónar +D.94This practice, if taken to an extreme, could stretch the ethical limits of privacy, as a MAC address is a unique identi er of each device (mobiles, computers). If we realise that nowadays every smartphone is associated with its user from the outset through apps and a data plan,it is easy to see how the MAC address can be something that allows a person to be identi ed.This project, called ‘Sé lo que hiciste en el último Sónar’ (I know what you did at the last Sónar) and run in collaboration with Barcelona SuperComputing Center (BSC-CNS),95 was publicly announced on the festival’s website days earlier as a collaborative experiment. The press release stated that BSC would ensure the anonymity of the data before feeding it into any database. The organisers also supplied a public website96 where anyone could view the data ‘in motion’ throughout the areas – that is, the in ux of people moving through the spaces. It was thus transparent and available to anyone.In this case we are dealing with use of Big Data by the festival itself to disclose one of the impacts of new technologies on societyAC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2016143