MAPPING CULTURE

fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts,
publishing, software and computer services, and television and radio (DCMS, 2001,
p.5). Interest has since grown demonstrably in the cultural sector’s capacity to attract
business and investment around the world, including in emergent economies such as
China (Keane, 2016).
However, these early mapping exercises were hampered by a number of limitations,
such as the lack of a precise sector definition leading to overreach, overlaps and gaps
in the statistics. There was also inconsistency in data sources and classification, and
an over-reliance on highly aggregated source data (Cunningham and Higgs, 2008). In
2002, DCMS released the Regional Cultural Data Framework (renamed as the 2004
DCMS Evidence Toolkit) to address the need for consistency in sector definition and
data collection. The DCMS framework proposed to cover a range of cultural activities
that can be classified under seven broad ‘sectors’/domains:
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Visual Art
Performance
Audio-Visual
Books and Press
Sport
Heritage
Tourism
The classification of culture in the DCMS framework is very different from that of the
aforementioned UNESCO framework, as sport and tourism are regarded as key
cultural domains rather than ‘related’ domains. After consulting several international
cultural statistics frameworks such as those proposed by the UNESCO and the
European Commission, the DCMS Cultural Data Framework decided to add a value
chain dimension to each of its major domains to form detailed metrics of industrial
activities. Its rationale was outlined in the document:
Culture has both a ‘material’ and a non-material dimension. The de 秜ᇘ nition of
cultural sector must focus upon material culture, and we understand this to be the
sum of activities and necessary resources (tools, infrastructure and artefacts)
involved in the whole ‘cycle’ of creation, making, dissemination,
exhibition/reception, archiving/preservation, and education/understanding
relating to cultural products and services (DCMS, 2004, p.10).
Different from the concept of ‘culture cycle’ used in UNESCO’s framework, the idea of
the value chain applied in the DCMS framework consists of six sequenced functions,
including the addition of the ‘archiving/preservation’ and ‘education/understanding’
functions, and the exclusion of the ‘consumption/participation’ function. The six
functions of the value chain activities are as below:
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