VISUALIZING THE FESTIVALS

Join us for hands-on sketching and discussion, exploring new ways to visualize the Edinburgh Festivals

📊 Edinburgh's 11 festivals (Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, Edinburgh International Science Festival, Edinburgh International Children's Festival, Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, Edinburgh International Festival, The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Edinburgh Art Festival, Edinburgh International Book Festival, and the Scottish International Storytelling Festival) generate huge amounts of data, from ticket sales and venues to programs, audiences, and community reach. This Vis Meetup will combine presentations and hands-on discussion to explore ways of making festival data understandable at scale for festival organizers, researchers, and the public, while also capturing the personal relevance of the festivals and the individual experiences associated with them.

🗓️ Thursday 26 November 2026, 16:30 to 18:00 📍 Edinburgh Futures Institute, ROOM 0.7 We will hear from James McVeigh (Festivals Edinburgh) about how the festivals are organized and how they have developed over time; Tomas Vancisin (Edinburgh Futures Institute) about how visualization can connect festivals; and students who participated in the Edinburgh Festivals Hackathon in October 2026, which focused on visualizing festival data for different purposes. There will also be opportunities to explore different perspectives on festival data through hands-on visualization sketching. Everyone interested in Edinburgh Festivals data and/or data visualization is welcome to join us. No prior experience with data or visualization is required.

📊 Festival Visualization Examples 🗺️ Mapping festivals and communities Edinburgh Culture and Community Mapping Project: Interactive maps of festival ticket sales, venues, and outreach, compared with sociodemographic data, including ticket sales by postcode sector and genre. → https://www.edinburghculturalmap.org/ 🎟️ Visualizing and exploring festival listings Edinburgh Festivals Listings API – Projects: Apps and visualizations built using festival event data, including Festival Clock (every event represented as a line that lights up and fades as the festival unfolds), Fringe Vibes (a scrollable visual grid of the shows), Plan My Festival (schedules optimized around ratings, walking time, and budget), and a Zegami demo for exploring large image collections. → https://api.edinburghfestivalcity.com/projects