One hand holds a tablet with event listings, while another stirs a bowl of pudding on a plate with crackers. "Help audiences easily find your events" is written across the bottom, next to the Artsdata logo.

Calling all arts organizations! Applications are now open for the 4th annual Digital Discoverability Program.

Between summer 2024 and winter 2025, you will have the opportunity to work one-on-one with the Artsdata team. Together, we will find solutions to boost the discoverability of your organization, by focusing on your: 

  • Event pages (i.e. pages describing upcoming live performances); 
  • Artist bios (i.e. pages describing the performers you present or represent); and/or
  • Wikidata items (i.e. entries describing your organization, your venues(s), your festival(s), and/or your artists).

As a result, local arts goers and tourists alike will have a much easier time finding your contents  via search engines (ex: Google, Bing), recommendation systems (ex: Siri, Alexa) and cultural calendars using the Artsdata knowledge graph! 

Requirements

In order to participate in the 2024-2025 Digital Discoverability program, you must:

  1. Be an arts organization; either a presenter, artistic company, agency/management company, or arts service organization.
  2. Manage a website where you publish event pages and/or artist bios.
  3. **Preferably**, have access to a web developer.
  4. Have a basic level of digital maturity.
  5. Assign a dedicated staff member to become your “Discoverability Lead”. This person will act as the primary cohort participant and contact person for the entire duration of the program

Costs

The value of this kind of work from a consultancy or other for-profit company is estimated at $2,500. However, the Digital Discoverability program is free for CAPACOA members.

Non-members whose applications are successful will have two different options:

  1. Submit a $250 registration fee to participate in the program only 

OR

  1. Join CAPACOA for a $250 introductory rate and take advantage of our other complementary services and member-only benefits (learn more).

How this will work

If your application is successful, you will have an initial meeting with a digital discoverability agent: either Émilie Frenette (if your organization is based in Quebec) or Dessa Hayes (if your organization is based in another province or territory). If you have upcoming events on your website, you may be asked to complete a self-diagnostic test before the meeting.
After discussing the current level of discoverability of your events and/or artists (with a focus on structured data), you will receive a preliminary diagnostic document that you can deliver to your web developer. You will also have the opportunity to schedule additional meetings to discuss other aspects of discoverability (including the SEO of your webpages and/or your Wikidata presence), and to follow up on any changes made to your webpages.

Selection criteria

Please note that current CAPACOA members will be given priority during the selection process.

Cohort participants will be onboarded one at a time and selected primarily on a first come, first served basis. If selected, participants may begin their initial training session before the application deadline.

Unselected applicants will have the opportunity to apply for a future cohort.

Learn more and apply

Interested in finding out more about the Digital Discoverability Program? Visit the program page or download the Call for Participation document.

Ready to apply? Fill out this Google form.

Application Deadline: Wednesday July 31, 2024


About the Linked Digital Future Initiative and the Artsdata Project

From 2018 to 2023, the Linked Digital Future Initiative deployed a range of research, prototyping and digital literacy activities to foster discoverability, digital collaboration and digital transformation in the performing arts. Since 2023, the LDFI has gradually given way to the Artsdata Linked Open Data Ecosystem project. As the name suggests, the Artsdata project pursues the same vision of an ecosystem where multiple collaborators enable the free circulation of performing arts data.

This project is funded by the Government of Canada and by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Logos for the Government of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts
Map of northern Canada with various icons, such as "house", "briefcase" and "heart" icons, over different towns, cities and regions.

Bill C-11 has been on a lot of minds since it passed Parliament and became law last spring. Also called the Online Streaming Act, it promises enhanced discoverability opportunities for Canadian content creators on platforms like YouTube, Spotify and Netflix.

But in order for these platform’s new algorithms to recommend Canadian content, they need to be told which creators are, in fact, Canadian. This is where provenance metadata comes into play.

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Written by Mariel Marshall, with contributions from Adrienne Wong

On Monday, November 6, at the Alt Hotel in Ottawa, I delved into the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence and its impact on the creative performance landscape. This conversation was part of CAPACOA’s 2023 Confluence conference, featuring Canadian artist Adrienne Wong.

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More often than not, artsgoers of all ages are discovering new artists, shows and festivals through some sort of digital device. Whether they’re searching “events near me” on Google or asking Alexa to find a playlist that fits their mood, they increasingly look no further beyond what their device (and the algorithm behind it) recommends.

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A hand holds a smartphone horizontally, displaying Google search results for “Events near me today”. An arrow points to the results, with the invitation to “Boost your digital presence so audiences can easily find your organization (and your events)”.

Calling all performing arts organizations! You are cordially invited to participate in the newest edition of CAPACOA’s Digital Discoverability Program, as part of the Linked Digital Future Initiative (LDFI) and in support of the Artsdata project.

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In our previous blog post on Wikimedia Commons, we explained how wonderful a discoverability opportunity this platform can be for performing arts. Over our series of data literacy workshops, we further stressed that everyone in the performing arts has a need for good live performance photos: performers, designers, presenters, journalists, associations, etc. Free-use images make common sense. In this blog post, we’ll explain that publishing free-use images is actually easier than you might think.

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Currently, much of the information about Canadian performing arts sector entities (including performers, directors, designers, choreographers, organizations, venues and events) is not properly formatted to be found, read and processed by search engines and other discovery technologies. As a result, it is too often ignored or underutilized.

The Linked Digital Future Initiative (LDFI) was created to make performing arts-related information findable and to help build better connections in our sector – between arts workers and audiences – in the digital age. One of the ways this has been achieved is by converting already publicly available information into reusable and accessible data in open databases, such as Wikidata and the Artsdata knowledge graph.

Although LDFI is leading this work, it will take many leaders in Canada’s performing arts sector contributing information to turn this vision into reality.

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CAPACOA is thrilled to announce that the LIVE Performing Arts Directory is now (in fact) live!

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Tanya Tagaq performing, wearing a vivid red dress and a long earring.

Why is Wikimedia Commons a discoverability opportunity for the performing arts?

In a previous post pointing out the essential steps to a productive digital presence for the performing arts, we highlighted as a best practice the sharing of images in the Wikimedia Commons media library, a sister project of Wikipedia and Wikidata, under a free to use Creative Commons licence.

This practice deserves our attention because even if it may seem complex or disorienting, it is above all an extraordinary way to benefit from the positive bias of search engines.

We’ll be looking at Wikimedia Commons from three different angles.

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On November 18th, 2021, CAPACOA’s Director of Research and Development Frédéric Julien and Cultural Strategist, Bridget MacIntosh presented “Your Digital Presence, Let’s Improve it” as part of CAPACOA’s Àndji Màdjitàwin / Reboot / Relance Virtual Conference.

As we designed this presentation, we asked ourselves: “if a performing arts organization could only afford to take one or two steps to enhance their digital presence, what should they do?” We considered the most recent research and development, as well as tried-and-tested methods. We considered the different stakeholders of the performing arts ecosystem and we came up with a short list of calls to action for each one. 

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