Question: Why did you choose to start your theatre predicting software?

Alison Whitaker answered on 21 Jun 2015:

Hi Nick, It’s part of the project I’m currently working on, so for this piece of software which looks at predicting who would come to any given performing arts performance, I worked with some people at The Audience Agency (they do lots of data analysis for different arts organisations) and talked to them about what they would like to be able to do. Then I (with another data scientist) looked at the data they had to work out what might be possible and came up with this idea. This is only one of the bits of software I’m working on, so at the National Theatre, they were really interested in what people are interested in across the country in fringe theatres, so we’ve been looking at conversations that people have online who go to fringe theatres.