CROSSPOST: Launching the Comic Cons Cultural Mapping Survey

All my favourite books start with a map. There’s some kind of magic in that little sketch of mountains and forests. A map of a fantastic new world like Middle-earth or Westeros always helps to make the familiar feel strange and the strange familiar.

Our project’s first research activity is to create a map of the comic cons, comic art festivals, and related media fandom events that took place in the United States, Canada, and Mexico during 2017. In recent years, cultural planners and policymakers have used mapping as a tool to understand the demand for cultural amenities and to help measure their impacts. Our map will serve as an interactive, public directory that organizers, exhibitors, and attendees can use to explore the sector. But to make it, we need your help.

If you organized a con in North America during 2017, please take our survey. We’ll ask some questions about your organization and about each of the events you ran, including features like size, venue, admission rates, and publicly announced policies. Anyone who is authorized to report on behalf of their organization can complete the survey, including owners or staff members / employees. We’ll use the data to build our map, as well as to calculate some aggregate statistics about the sector as a whole.

The survey will be available at https://cuhealth.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3rbrHiqmvmkCRE1 until March 15. Please share it with your colleagues and contacts in your networks.

Image credit: “Middle Earth Google Maps,” Mark Carpenter (mbingcrosby), https://m.imgur.com/t/lord_of_the_rings/whKZ7KM.