Measuring cultural value using social network analysis: A case study on valuing electronic musicians

In evaluating how creative a program or an artefact is, a key factor to consider is the value inherent in that program or artefact. We investigate how to measure subjective, cultural value: value which has been expressed by members of a community towards other members. Specifically we focus on a case study asking:to what extent can we use social network activity to examine the value that electronic musicians place in each other’s work?Focusing on activity by electronic musicians on the music social network SoundCloud, we combined qualitative and quantitative research to understand and trace significant ‘valuing activities’ in SoundCloud data. Exploring interaction on the site in this guided way has enabled us to compare, contrast and assess what value is attributed to different members of the electronic music community on SoundCloud. In this paper we report our results and consider how this work offers a methodology for computational analysis of cultural value. We hypothesise that this methodology is extensible to other creative domains; potentially this could lead to a tool for automated cultural value judgement methods on large social network datasets. Hence we move towards computationally generated evaluations of value, a fundamental part of creativity.