Networking the Arts: Source Documentation

For our project, we are tracking the events hosted throughout the Weitz over some time. From what we’ve heard back from the few people on campus about retrieving this information – it may prove more difficult than initially perceived. Yet, we persevere with what we have. At the moment, we are inputting the data ourselves together in a shared Google sheet. We are collecting the information via the Arts @ Carleton Calendar. The format is akin to a calendar you can scroll through that can be added to Google Calendar as well. It needs to be formatted into an Excel sheet or something similar so that we can feed the data into platforms like ArcGIS or Flourish. This information is publicly available to everyone with a simple Google search, so it is not information owned by the college or anyone else. There should be no sensitive data within our collection of sources since most people posting events on this public calendar do so to promote their events, and all artists are aware of the publicity of said events. 

Within our sheet, we are tracking several categories for each event: Event Name, Duration, Start and End Date, Year, Description, Category (Type of Event), Department, Location (in Weitz), Artist(s), Artist Description, and Event Mode (In-person/Virtual). Due to the large amount of information we are gathering about each event, we may only be able to collect around 2 months of data. However, we plan to make this data both visually and physically engaging through our presentation. We may have to edit our data to fit the format of the graphs or maps to use Open Refine or some simple regular expressions. 

The other source of information we may use to make a map to display the events happening within the Weitz is the publicly available floorplans of the Weitz Center on Carleton College’s Map. We are going to download them in their current format: pdfs, and try and convert them into tile layers on ArcGIS online. 

Primary Sources: 

Floor Blueprints provided by campus maps 

• Carleton College’s Map
  • Available floorplans of the Weitz 

Carleton Calendar

• https://www.carleton.edu/arts/events/arts-calendar/

Citations: 

Map, Campus. “Campus Map – Carleton College.” Carleton, February 22, 2024. https://www.carleton.edu/map/. 

Music Additions Floor Plans. Accessed February 24, 2024. https://carleton-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/sites/740/2021/12/Academic_Calendar_22_23.pdf. 

​​Carleton, Arts at. “Carleton Arts Calendar – Carleton College.” Carleton, December 10, 2021. https://www.carleton.edu/arts/events/arts-calendar/.