Studying Representation on NAC's Stages

Legend for the ethnicities used in the graphs. White represented by a light grey, Indigenous a bright yellow, Black the colour black, Arab a bright green, Hispanic blue and Asian by purple. 

The goal of this data work is to recognize whether the NAC commission was successful in presenting Canadian culture and heritage through its popular music programming. The data was extracted from the NAC’s annual reports from 1969 to 1976, and inputted into a GoogleSheet. The original data included the report year, event date, artist(s) name, and information about the type of programming to capture whether or not it was part of NAC’s programming or a rental event.

The dataset was then augmented to include: ensemble type (solo, group), musical genre, gender and race/ethnicity of the performer/ensemble members and their geographic origins.

We developed and used the colour scheme identified above to capture race and ethnicity of the performers.