While I was wandering the wilderness away from my blog (lots of reasons, I’ll tell you over a drink sometime), lots of important and intriguing things happened in the arts world that I didn’t get a chance to share. Chief among them was a fantastic effort by Theatre Bay Area (alongside WolfBrown) to research and test new metrics for the impact of theater. The final report (in book form) is called Counting New Beans.
Rather than exploring the economic, or social, or educational impact of attending live theater events, the project dug deep to both define and measure intrinsic impact — the emotional, cognitive, intellectual, and personal impacts that come from the experience.
Click for full-size image.
Clayton Lord, the project’s director and an essay contributor, gives a great overview of the inspiration, goals, and findings of the initiative. You can also download and read several elements of the published work (take a look at WolfBrown’s executive summary in PDF format). As a systems and modeling guy, I was particularly intrigued by the logic/flow chart about how the “impact cycle” works — with correlation data informing the relative strength of the connections.
Much fun. Much to read. Much to learn. Whee!
