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A Critical History of Cultural Indicators

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Making Culture Count

Part of the book series: New Directions in Cultural Policy Research ((NDCPR))

Abstract

The topic of cultural measurement often evokes the quotation, ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’ Although commonly attributed to Albert Einstein, there is no evidence that Einstein actually wrote this, as the legend goes, on the blackboard in his office at Princeton University. Based on an older expression, the phrase should probably instead be attributed to sociologist William Bruce Cameron (1963, 13), who writes:

It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines and draw charts as the economists do. However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

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Authors
  1. Emma Blomkamp
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Melbourne, Australia

    Lachlan MacDowall  & Marnie Badham  & 

  2. Innovate Change, New Zealand

    Emma Blomkamp

  3. Cultural Development Network, Australia

    Kim Dunphy

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© 2015 Emma Blomkamp

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Blomkamp, E. (2015). A Critical History of Cultural Indicators. In: MacDowall, L., Badham, M., Blomkamp, E., Dunphy, K. (eds) Making Culture Count. New Directions in Cultural Policy Research. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-46458-3_2

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