Hal Morrissey Gillman
Data Architecture and Analytics Coordinator, The Fringe Society
On the Fringes of Possibility!

As the world's largest arts festival embedded in the middle of an active city, the Fringe is a unique environment for data science. From audience experience to accommodation concerns and transport planning, there are lots of areas of focus for stats enthusiasts. The Fringe Society is the convening body of this decentralised festival, and as a result, holds a lot of data that pertain to these different challenges across show activity, city visitors, ticketing patterns, and more. As a result of recent government funding, the Fringe Society is in a position to begin properly leveraging this data for the benefit of artists, venues, audiences and the wider city. In this short talk, I'd like to briefly speak to some of these technical infrastructural plans, as well as some of the more interesting possible use cases that this will allow for, and how these are intended to support the Fringe community.

Dorsey Kaufmann
Data Visualisation Artist and Designer, Edinburgh University
Representing Fringe Data: Exploring Data Visualizations from EFI Students

In this talk, I’ll showcase student projects from the Edinburgh Futures Institute ‘Representing Data’ course, focusing on data visualizations created using the Edinburgh Fringe datasets. The projects emphasize making the Fringe data visual and accessible, with an attention to user experience design that serves the needs of diverse audiences such as festival organizers, city planners, cultural researchers, and accessibility advocates. By approaching the data from multiple user perspectives, these visualizations showcase a wide range of data-driven methods for understanding the festival, informing decision-making, and supporting varied facets of event planning.

Joshua Ryan-Saha
Director – Traveltech, Edinburgh Futures Institute
Hackathon to Hub: Building University-Festival Data Partnerships

This talk explores how the University of Edinburgh is developing systematic data partnerships with Edinburgh's festivals as part of our civic mission. Drawing on lessons from our successful Festival Data Hackathon and transport modelling work through the Smart Data Foundry, I'll outline how we're planning on scaling these pilot initiatives into a comprehensive festivals data hub. The session will cover our roadmap for creating useful collaborations that benefit both the university and Edinburgh's world-renowned festival ecosystem.

Hal Morrissey Gillman
Data Architecture and Analytics Coordinator, The Fringe Society

Dorsey Kaufmann
Data Visualisation Artist and Designer, Edinburgh University

Joshua Ryan-Saha
Director – Traveltech, Edinburgh Futures Institute
 

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