Measuring collective human behaviour has traditionally been a time-consuming and expensive process, impairing the speed at which data can be made available to decision makers in policy. Can data generated through widespread use of online services help provide faster insights? Here, we consider an example relating to policymaking for culture and the arts: publicly funded museums and galleries in the UK. We show that data on Google searches for museums and galleries can be used to generate estimates of their visitor numbers. Crucially, we find that these estimates can be generated faster than traditional measurements, thus offering policymakers early insights into changes in cultural participation supported by public funds. Our findings provide further evidence that data on our use of online services can help generate timely indicators of changes in society, so that decision makers can focus on the present rather than the past.

中文翻译：

---

寻找艺术品：使用Google趋势快速估算画廊和博物馆的参观次数

传统上，衡量集体人类行为是一个耗时且昂贵的过程，从而降低了向决策者提供数据的速度。通过广泛使用在线服务生成的数据能否帮助提供更快的洞察力？在这里，我们考虑一个与文化和艺术政策制定有关的示例：英国的公共资助博物馆和画廊。我们在Google上显示该数据对博物馆和美术馆的搜索可用于生成其访客人数的估算值。至关重要的是，我们发现这些估算的生成速度比传统的估算更快，因此，决策者可以提前了解由公共资金支持的文化参与的变化。我们的发现提供了进一步的证据，证明我们使用在线服务的数据可以帮助及时生成社会变化的指标，从而使决策者可以专注于当前而不是过去。