 Hello everybody. I'm a researcher at the University of Melbourne, working in collaboration with museums here, local museums, to advance their use of innovative technologies. Unfortunately, I couldn't join today because of some unexpected circumstances, but I'm happy to share with you my project virtually, and I hope that this presentation will be engaging, useful, and it will lead to some interesting discussions in the end. Today I would like to present my project, which is developing a dynamic online application, Museums of PowerMap. The agenda for today is as follows. First, I will present the conceptual framework of this project. Second, I will share details about the current pilot project that I'm working on in collaboration with their local museum, the Australian Center for the Moving Image. And finally, I will demonstrate their demo version of the soft power method system that has been developed. Soft Power is the term first coined by American professor of international relations Joseph Nye to describe an ability of the country to influence behavior of others through persuasion and attraction. Nye argues that this new type of power offers an alternative solution to address the complexity of international relations by employing culture as the foundation for international influence upon other societies. A country on the international stage can achieve influence by building networks, communicating compelling narratives, establishing international rules, and drawing on the resources that make this country naturally attractive to the world. In the last decades, the concept of soft power has gained a strong international popularity among politicians, academics, and practitioners in the field of international relations. More importantly, soft power as a concept started to be employed not only in relation to countries as the main actors on the world stage, but also to non-state actors and, of course, museums. A huge inspiration in my project is the book by Lorde and Black and Barrick Museums, Cities and Soft Power, published in 2015 by the American Alliance of Museums. And the book illustrates that in the 21st century, museums are experiencing a new transformation turning them from sites of branded experiences to the places of soft power. Produced by museum professionals and cultural consultants rather than academics, the book draws on a number of case studies from around the world, which indicate that non-museums really play a leading role in growing competition among cities for talent, tourism, and art. Museums acquire soft power by enhancing the importance of cities and empowering their residents and visitors. They become centers for social activism, innovation, and technology development. They attract visitors and generate economic impact. They facilitate international connections and host important global events. A nation's soft power is increasingly subject to measurements with, for example, portlands of power 30 or a global power city index reports providing an evidence of this trend. These initiatives have generated a series of global indicators based on culture, education, science, politics, and of course economy to annually assess the extent to which nations have risen through or declined upon these indexes. Challenging these attempts to measure soft power, my research reconfigures the framework of soft power evaluations by stressing three important points that have been overlooked in previous research. First, I argue that measuring soft power of a whole country is misleading. Since these evaluations, they don't take into consideration their complex nature of different and very often competing actors within the country who generate and exert different degrees of soft power upon global publics. Instead, I focus on museums as important actors in the international arena which has their distinctive identities, brands, audiences, and of course followers. Second, I employ a specially oriented software represented by geographic information system to map and visualize soft power geographical thread and reach, an important variable that is usually missing in existing evaluation dashboard systems. Specifically, my research demonstrates that it is not conductive to measures of power in general terms, assuming that the power appeal of a particular country or an actor is the same in different geographical locations around the globe. Instead, I employ cultural analytics and city statistics of specific locations of specific cities and these statistics can include cultural diversity and vibrancy, local language and religion to evaluate the soft power appeal to people living in this specific area, considering it is a politically, culturally and economically defined local. Finally, my research emphasizes the needs to focus on evaluations of soft power capacities or resources rather than inputs. It is important to note that Nike himself indicated that soft power is generated through activation of key resources. Fresh sociologists and philosophers Pierre Bourdon also stressed that power usually takes the form of resources, which he called capitals, that can be created, accumulated, exchanged, and finally consumed. He identified various types of capital including our cultural capital, social capital, and economic capital which are evenly distributed among social classes. Most importantly, from this theory, capitals as forms of power exist not in isolation, but are relational to each other and transferable. They operate in fields or structured spaces of struggle over specific types of capitals and can manifest, can be manifested through symbolic power, the most powerful force which we can also define as soft power. So, according to Bourdon, all types of capital can function as a symbolic capital when it obtains explicit or practical recognition of legitimacy. So, in my work, I take the correlation between the Nike soft power and the Bourdon symbolic capital as the main source of inspiration to propose a comprehensive framework that can clearly articulate the social soft power in relation to museums. The geographic information system software that I'm developing right now operates as a combination of deep mapping layers, each representing a different dimension of museum capitals tied to a specific location on the globe. The resources of cultural layer exposes the global diversity and scope of museum collections, highlighting the geographic areas of their origins and calculating the collections power appeal index in relation to different countries. The outputs of social layer maps complex museum ecosystems by visualizing museum social resources and telling stories about the engagements with the constituencies, partners and audiences on the local and global level. The inputs or economic layer builds on the metric of economic effects measures through ticket sales at home and abroad, local international program service revenue and income received through peripheral services demonstrating the local power of attraction measures through economic gains. In my project, I argue that mapping different types of resources and capitals can visualize museum symbolic capital or soft power. The main goal of this dynamic mapping system that I'm developing is to map various types of capital to explore correlations between them and to identify factors which pay an important role in time space development of museum soft power. However, you can imagine this is quite big and ambitious project. To start with more feasible goals, I have developed a pilot in collaboration with Australian Center for the Modern Image, or ACME. ACME has its roots in the State Film Center, which was established in 1946 to maintain a film collection for public use. ACME opened in 2010 and it really became an iconic map landmark. Today it houses the nation's largest collection of moving image documents, including videos, films, rock content, gaming and other hybrid forms of digital media. A young, dynamic and ambitious institution, ACME in 15 years of its existence managed to develop a large audience, reaching in last year more than 1.5 million visitors to the Federation Square where it is located and more than half a million attendants of its international exhibitions in six different countries around the world. With 22% international visitors, it generates more than 11.5 million dollars through ticket sales and program service revenue on an annual basis. As a partner in the project, ACME is providing access to its historical institutional records and digital expertise to develop the geographic information system which will trace and measure the development of the ACME soft power in time space. The pilot project aims to employ museum records in the last 15 years in collection exposition and strategic programming to map and visualize a growing geographic diversity of the museum cultural resources and activities to explore how this international exposure affects audiences and affects the development of a brand recognition of this institution around the world. The first stage in the pilot project that has been completed is mapping ACME collections and calculating collection appeal power index to different countries. First, it is important to say that ACME has unbelievably rich diverse collections. It has more than 200,000 original items and more than 40,000 titles and the majority of the collections are available online and it has been catalogued. The collection also is quite diverse because 70% of films produced outside Australia and not only in the United States or the United Kingdom, for example, but also in France, in Germany, in Japan, in China or in New Zealand. Furthermore, the ACME collections are quite linguistically diverse. There are movies in around 49 different languages which have spoken in more than 230 countries around the world. For example, extensive collections in English, which originate from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the UK and other countries, provide the potential content access to people from 100 countries. While, for example, films in French could potentially reach people in 48 countries around the world and films in Arabic could target populations of 27 countries. Such a linguistically diverse content provides an opportunity for a much larger scope of potential audiences to understand the potential appeal power of the ACME collections to people from different countries. I consider two main types of criteria. First is the collections criteria and in this case I explored how many collections items were produced in a certain country and then I calculated how many films in the ACME collections are actually in the language or languages spoken in this country. On the other hand, I looked also at social economic criteria to bring to light some nuances. For example, I explored integration statistics in Melbourne to find out how many tourists come to this city from a specific country on an annual basis and how many people, for example, live right now in Melbourne as immigrants from this specific country. And finally, I considered the internet penetration rate, which affects the collection access and discoverability online. Finally, I calculated the collection appeal power index as a weight sum of what subsided sub-indexes across two different criteria that I have just established. This is a video capture of the demo version of the method system, which is available online. It shows the ACME collection appeal power index in different countries, which ranges from 0 to 1. And there is visualized on the map by the intensity of the blue color applied to different countries. When you click a country, the app indicates how many movies were produced in these specific countries and also how many films in the ACME collections are in the spoken language or languages of this country. It also considers different secondary factors that we talked about earlier, such as internet penetration rate, ancestry, immigration and tourism. So if you, for example, go to the UK, you can see that the ACME collection appeal power index in this country is pretty high, which almost reaches 0.9. And this is not a surprise because the majority of the ACME collections are produced in English language. As you can see here, there is a great number of movies in English. And also our internet penetration rate in the UK is pretty high. Also, if you consider social demographics, the British ancestry is very common among the Melbourne population. And there are still a lot of immigrants who come from the UK to live in Melbourne. And of course, there are a lot of tourism who come from the UK to visit Melbourne every year. And even though this tourism rate here seems pretty small, but in comparison to other countries, believe me, it's very high. Because there are many countries on the map where there are no people, there are zero people who actually come to visit Melbourne. For example, Egypt, we can see zero, or some other countries in Africa, or how many people from Russia. Not so many. So this is the statistics for 2016, which shows that, for example, in 2016, there were almost zero tourists coming from Russia to the UK. And these factors actually play a really important role in calculating this power appeal index of the collection. People are living in different countries around the world because they show the potential and a chance of collection discoverability and access to the population living in this country. Even though the first stage of the pilotage is completed, there are a lot of challenges that are needed to be addressed. And first of all, uncataloged or poorly annotated items in the collections complicates the mapping process. Second, in order to tell meaningful stories about the collections, one has to conduct an archival research of the institutional rapids, which dates back to 1946. Finally, in the last 50 years, ECME has produced around 400 movies about immigrant communities in Melbourne, which add more complexity to map the collection diversity. The mapping exercise of the collection revealed that there are gaps in the institutional records and the collection's soft power is not really activated yet. So the next stage in the project is to map global social ecosystem of ECME by looking at its international engagements with other museums, audiences and cultural institutions around the world. For example, in 2015, ECME started to implement a series of long buster exhibits in different countries in collaboration with the Dreamworks Animation, their very famous Hollywood company. The exhibition features over 400 items including rare never seen before drawings, models, original artworks, their interviews and interactive displays from the Dreamworks. And there it has been through in different venues around the globe, which include first Arts Science Museum in Singapore, the Papa Museum in New Zealand, Seoul Museum of Arts and South Korea, National Taiwan Science and Education Centre in Taipei, Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey in Mexico and Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa, Canada. In each specific location, the exhibit attracted different amount of audiences and generated different economic revenue. Using cultural analytics, it is interesting to explore what factors influence the generation of soft power in different places. Factors for consideration include those that define the enabling environment and these are the city population and diversity including immigrants, city international tourism, cultural vibrancy, cultural infrastructure, competition, cultural participation and cultural consumption. Also it is important to take into account cost museum factors which include local museum audiences and diversity, museum ranking among tourists, architecture and facilities, for example historical sites of significance of famous design buildings like the Guggenheim Bilbao for example, which plays an important role in generating this extra power of attraction of audiences and tourists. And of course the brand and the popularity of the partners involved in the project plays a huge role. So for example the global reputation and visibility of the Dreamworks make this exhibition even more appealing among audiences around the world, which were already exposed to a lot of very famous movies of this company before the exhibition came to visit the city. Also cultural assets play a huge role and in these big blockbusters they become really activated and they become really good sources of soft power. Right now I'm in the process to map the blockbuster, local impacts in different countries and will be happy to share results once available. As you can see I'm in the middle of my pilot project development and there is a long way for me to complete it. However I envision this pilot as a robust platform for developing a more universal museum application, not only for example for the Acme Museum here in Australia, but that can be actually used by any museum around the world to visualize and explore the soft power potential. It is a pleasure to present this project to you today and I'm looking forward to receiving your questions or comments positive or negative via email. I will be happy to continue conversation with those who are interested in the project and thank you so much for your attention and enjoy the rest of your conference.