Performing Arts and Digital Humanities

Digital traces, whether digitized (programs, notebooks, drawings, etc.) or born digital (emails, websites, video recordings, etc.), constitute a major challenge for the memory of the ephemeral performing arts.

Digital technology transforms traces into data and, in doing so, opens them up to manipulation. This paradigm shift calls for a renewal of methodologies for writing the history of theater today, analyzing works and their creative process, and preserving performances. At the crossroads of performing arts studies, the history, digital humanities, conservation and archiving, these methodologies allow us to take into account what is generally dismissed, namely, digital traces that are considered too complex, too numerous, too fragile, of dubious authenticity, etc.

With the analysis of Merce Cunningham's digital traces as a guideline, and through many other examples, this book is intended for researchers and archivists, as well as artists and cultural institutions.

Auteur
Clarisse Bardiot is Associate Professor at the Universite Polytechnique Hauts-de-France. She conducts research on the epistemology of performing arts and digital technologies, at the intersection of the history, aesthetics, digital humanities, documentation and preservation of works.

Contenu

Foreword ix
Bruno BACHIMONT

Preface xiii

Introduction xxxv

Chapter 1. The Digital Trace: From Data to Metatrace 1

1.1. Tracing the ephemeral 2

1.1.1. An impossible history? 3

1.1.2. Relying on traces 4

1.2. The digital trace 8

1.2.1. Digitized traces 9

1.2.2. Born digital traces 10

1.2.3. Heterogeneous, numerous and fragile traces 11

1.3. Transforming traces into data 14

1.3.1. Analog trace and digital trace 14

1.3.2. From trace to data: the datatrace 16

1.3.3. Metatrace 22

1.4. Performing arts data 25

1.4.1. Performing arts data landscapes 25

1.4.2. The Semantic Web paradigm 27

1.4.3. Transforming the living archive into data 33

1.5. Conclusion 38

Chapter 2. Preserving the Impermanent 41

2.1. Note: scoring the representation 42

2.1.1. Notation of the performing arts 43

2.1.2. Scoring 49

2.1.3. From autography to allography: scoring digital works 52

2.1.4. The performing arts, between allography and autography 57

2.2. Diachronic documentation: reconnecting with the process 62

2.2.1. Making digital traces last 63

2.2.2. Taking the creation processes into account 66

2.3. Annotating: redocumentarizing traces 69

2.3.1. Digital as an annotation practice 71

2.3.2. The special case of video recording 73

2.3.3. Intra- and inter-documentary approaches 76

2.3.4. MemoRekall, a video annotation tool for redocumentarizing traces 79

2.4. Denote/connote: artistic intent and datatraces 83

2.4.1. Articulating close and distant reading 83

2.4.2. Rekall 90

2.5. Conclusion 95

Chapter 3. Writing the History of the Performing Arts 97

3.1. Sources and resources 99

3.1.1. Theater studies and digital humanities 100

3.1.2. Scrutinizing 105

3.1.3. Going back to the source 110

3.2. Exposing traces 113

3.2.1. Linking 114

3.2.2. Structuring 119

3.2.3. Reconstructing 124

3.3. Analyzing performing arts data 127

3.3.1. History 129

3.3.2. Literature 135

3.3.3. Shows 141

3.4. Conclusion 147

Conclusion 149

Glossary 153

References 163

Index of Names 179

Index of Terms 183