Image by Nomadic Lass – Flickr Creative Commons license
Since we launched the new Createquity at the end of October, the pace of new articles here has been a little…sporadic. In part that’s by design: as part of our new approach to content generation, we’re highly aware of the constant barrage of stimulation our readers face from all sides these days. We’re not trying to besiege you with hundreds of posts a week, as some sites do (seriously). We figure if we don’t publish as often, we can do more to make each one count.
But don’t be fooled: even as we’ve kept up the schedule with our monthly Newsroom articles and a handful of Research Spotlights, there’s been a lot going on behind the scenes these past few months. Most notably, we recruited a new crop of editorial team members (names to be announced soon), which in turn has allowed us to get the gears in motion on our core research process.
What is our core research process, you might ask? There’s much more at our brand-new page describing the gory details, but in short it’s the backbone of Createquity’s reason to exist: to figure out what we can do about the most important issues in the arts. We started this work last summer over a planning retreat in Los Angeles, which resulted in the definition of a healthy arts ecosystem that currently graces our front page. At the moment we’re investigating the research literature on the arts to find the biggest gaps between that utopian definition and the realities we face today. We’re dividing that work into two broad areas that will guide most of our editorial efforts for at least the near future: disparities of access to the arts and the capacity of our field to make change.
We’ve now started to make some progress within the disparities of access issue area, particularly as it relates to economic disadvantage and the arts. Our first feature article sharing some preliminary findings from this research is in the works, and if this is an area where you happen to have some research expertise, we’d love your help. On Createquity Insider, the portion of our site where we share our in-progress learning, we’ve published a list of hypotheses relating to economic disadvantage and our healthy arts ecosystem definition, along with a bibliography of studies we’ve examined to date that have seemed particularly relevant to those hypotheses. If you know of other publications that we should be looking at, and I’m sure they are out there, please let us know in a comment here or by emailing info@createquity.com. If we end up using one of your suggestions, we’ll be sure to give you a shout-out!
Speaking of which, it’s easier than ever to follow along with our research process and everything else we’re up to via Createquity Insider. In addition to checking up via the website or subscribing to the RSS feed, you can now sign up to receive an email update every time we post something new (about 6-8 times a month). We’ve also opened up direct access to the rapidly growing collection of research we’re investigating via Zotero, so if you’re really hardcore, you can spend some time over there looking over our raw notes. We’re always looking for opportunities to fill gaps in our knowledge or improve our process in any way, so if you have knowledgeable feedback for us, don’t hold back!
As always, thanks for being a part of the Createquity community.