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OpinionLetters

Letters | Turn to big data to help Hong Kong’s cultural and creative industries

  • Readers discuss how to give Hong Kong’s creative sectors a data push, and whether the city is ready for self-driving cars

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Hong Kong director Tang Yi poses with the Short Film Palme d’Or for her film “All the Crows in the World” at the Cannes Film Festival on July 17, 2021. The cultural and creative industries have become a focus of development in Hong Kong. Photo: EPA-EFE
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The cultural and creative industries – which include film, the performing arts, publishing, advertising and art – have become a focus of development in Hong Kong. In its latest budget, the government allocated nearly HK$200 million for the integration of art and technology, on top of HK$100 million set aside last year.
If this public money is to be spent more effectively, it’s not enough to focus on using advanced technologies to enhance the content and delivery of artistic creation and deepen audience experience, as the government has pledged to do.
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We should also leverage technology to improve the government’s decision-making and evaluation capabilities, support the operation of cultural organisations, improve understanding of audience preferences, and help categorise traditional and new cultural assets. This is where big data can play a huge role.

In recent years, China has been discussing establishing a system of national cultural big data to enable data-driven decision-making among governments, cultural groups and investors. It is also expected to boost the ecosystem to help practitioners improve operating efficiency and output. It could also create more jobs.

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To establish this data trove, we would have to collect a massive amount of data in diverse formats, including text, audio and video. It should be of high frequency, real-time and online. It should cover existing and emerging content, such as “we-media”, non-fungible tokens and even the metaverse.

Such a task would be challenging for Hong Kong. Firstly, data is kept in silos by different organisations. Even the definition of what makes up the cultural and creative industries varies: the Census and Statistics Department lists 11 components; CreateHK, the government department which promotes the development of creative industries, lists eight sectors; and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council focuses on 10 major art forms. Meanwhile, information on data.gov.hk is fragmented.

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