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Wherever the creative industries have been prioritized by the state, a key element of the process of capturing, consolidating and illuminating them has been to quantify them-a hazardous task in an area with a long history of definitional slippage and a paucity of robust, comparable data. Far and away the preferred approach and terminology, following the UK example, has been that of statistical "mapping" of these industries.
Thus, in the UK, the British Council described the 1998 "mapping exercise" as "the first genuine analysis of the economic impact of the creative sector on the UK economy"; New Zealand's mapping document, similarly, was designed "to generate soundly based estimates of contributions to GDP for individual creative industries and then for the creative sector . . . as a whole"; and perhaps most optimistically of all, Australia's National Mapping Project for the Creative Digital Industries was described as nothing less than an attempt to "map the size, scope and structure of creative industries in Australia through quantitative mapping and statistical definitional collection processes."
If the language was grandiose, however, the reality-at least in the case of the 1998 UK prototype-was somewhat more prosaic. Certainly, the "map" included no (spatial) maps per se; the only geography comprised scattered references to the locations of key industry employers and, more substantively, data (where available) on imports and exports and their principal sources and destinations. Moreover, there was, in actual fact, no singular "map" at all: the final output was and remains 13 discrete documents, one dedicated to each sub-sector, making the headline appellation "Mapping Document" a highly misleading one. Misleading but, as I argue below, revealingly so: conferring comparability on extremely diverse areas of the economy, and thus constituting a single identifiable "creative economy" at large, was a critical element of the project.
Thus, if the analysis of "Television and radio" could claim a moderate degree of depth and breadth, only two pages could be mustered on "Advertising," while only a smidgen over one was offered on "Crafts." For each individual sub-sector, the report authors endeavored to provide information on six main fronts.
First, market size, segmentation and historic growth data were presented, with the market segmented in some cases along multiple axes (for example, commercial versus non-commercial revenues, and domestic versus internationally generated revenues).
Second, the report tried to estimate how many people were employed in the area in question, and identified any notable patterns in respect of employee gender and employment type (e.g. permanent versus freelance).
Third, there was a description of the types of companies operating in the sector, how they varied by size, and how they were distributed across the supply chain.
Fourth, the report documented any important industry trends, of which consolidation was a common example.
Fifth, there was a prognosis for growth.
Sixth and finally, and perhaps most important in terms of the limited effort to link the 13 individual documents together, the sub-sector in question was pictured graphically alongside those areas of the economy considered "related" and "peripheral"-only some of which belonged among the other "creative" sub-sectors.
Thus, in many cases, the graphic made it patently clear that even if the industry under analysis was itself considered "creative," its connections to other "creative" industries were minimal. Indeed, two sub-sectors ("Architecture" and "Software") were pictured as having no "creative" relations at all, even peripheral ones.