I’d like to propose a conversation about using technology in the performing arts classroom, especially in relationship to playwriting and collaborative work. I recently taught a hybrid section of first-year writing and spent the semester looking for ways to create  lessons that were more than just online versions of what we did in class; the real challenge was finding lessons that made the online classroom the ideal environment rather than just the one we were given. I’m teaching a playwriting class in the fall and want to find ways to make online work relevant and engaging.

Performing arts digital archives–you’ve seen them, you’ve heard of some amazing ones, maybe you’re working on or with one now. What are the most important pieces of a performing arts digital archive? What should one look like? What can they do? What could they do?

This session invites you to imagine the ideal performing arts digital archive, and, since we’re all into performing arts, perform this archive right then and there.

We’ll spend the first half of the session hashing out the top ten most important parts of a performing arts archive. Once we’ve reached consensus, we’ll break into groups and each “play” one of these parts à la charades for the other groups to guess. Part performance, part brainstorming, part game, this session offers us a chance to concretely discuss what we want to see in digital archives for performing arts and, by putting this ideal into immediate and fleeting action, also reminds us about the ephemerality of the materials we seek to collect and archive.

This session’s Google doc notes and lists of most important parts of digital archives for performing arts

For centuries, the conventional definition of theatre has been of an event occurring in real time in front of a live audience in a physical space. In the last decade alone, there have been hundreds of examples that have put that categorization to the test (one example: www.digitaltheatre.com).  With the rapid advance of technology, theatre has a responsibility to embrace this (r)evolution or ultimately fall further by the wayside. How can we utilize these advances, both artistically and administratively, to transform the theatrical landscape so we can further investigate, innovate and interact with fellow artists across the globe?

Until recently, theatre hasn’t been able to avoid creating sleep-inducing footage when it’s recorded or digitized. It somehow loses its spirit as fast as the present becomes the past; leaving one with the same feeling one has when they stopped being in love. Where does the spirit go? How can that magic remain? How can we keep it interesting for everyone, not just academics and researchers? Is it just a document of a past event, or can we find a way for it to be a living, breathing experience?

During the spring semester of 2013, three acting teachers at three different colleges linked their class discussions through Twitter under the hashtag #ACTweets. (The instructions for students can be found here.) The pedagogical experiment allowed students and teachers to directly interact and discuss with others in Acting 1 classes at CUNY colleges around the city. We thought of it like having the one-on-one attention of a smaller classroom, but the scope and breadth of the CUNY system.

This project was motivated by a desire to help students think through and about acting outside the classroom and was organized by:

@eero_laine – Eero Laine, Acting 1 at the College of Staten Island
@rayelz – Rayya El Zein, Acting 1 at City College
@defyinggravitas – Barrie Gelles, Intro to Acting and Acting 1&2 at Brooklyn College

In light of this recent experiment, we hope to have an open conversation about using social media in (and outside of) the performing arts classroom. What has worked? What has failed? How do students respond? Do the performing arts need social media?

Extending the conversation on the new invisibility/visibility of the library in the digital age begun by Tom Scheinfeldt in Nobody Cares about the Library, we (Mary Isbell and I) would like to discuss if/how creating a digital archive requires the scholar to step back as  “the author” and instead become a curator of data and content. In his post, Scheinfeldt argues that the library should embrace invisibility by encouraging access to content through better search interfaces, APIs, and social media. How does this notion of visibility/invisibility help us think about the challenges facing DH scholars for whom visible authorship is the means to tenure and promotion? Is it fair to say that tools like Omeka have prompted a trend in curatorship amongst scholars who would otherwise rely on the library for that work? Has it also provided a way for the library to become more visible?

This session will show users how the content management system of he Cuban Theater Digital Archive (cubantheater.org) works. It will allow artists, scholars, and librarians to test it out and consider its use for other theater/performance digital archives. The platform is built upon a relational database structure that guides the creation of a modular system architecture, built using existing open source software to ensure interoperability with other tools or modules being developed elsewhere to support digital humanities initiatives. This infrastructure provides rich interaction and easy navigation of site content, facilitates contributions of text and multimedia content from geographically dispersed partners while placing intellectual property rights at the forefront of the content submission work flow, increases capacity to create and deliver video content along with appropriate metadata, and allows for the peer review, approval, and innovative scholarly interaction with and publication of site content.  works.

For the technologically savvy: This content management framework, named Romeu after the Cuban musician Armando Romeu, was made live at cubantheater.org in early 2012, with access to the system opened to all significant content contributors. In addition, the Romeu software powering the CTDA was made available as open source software at github.com/umdsp/romeu. Romeu is built on the Python-based Django framework and it aims to be a simple but powerful content management system for multilingual theatrical archives. Vaunting itself as a “web framework for perfectionists with deadlines,” Django allows for the quick, elegant deployment of textual data-driven websites. As another plus, the Python programming language which underpins it has always been at the forefront of internationalization, a distinct advantage when compared with certain other options on the open source market.

Two of the barriers to providing access to special collections (including performing arts documentation) are time and descriptive metadata. Librarians are often short on the time and resources necessary to properly describe and make available special collections. Additionally, specialized knowledge often lies with the content creators.

I have recently had the opportunity to investigate alternatives to traditional
indexes and collaborative cataloging for special collections. Amy Ballmer (CUNY
Graduate Center) and I explored alternative methods of indexing (including
collaborative tagging with art historians) for small press and avant-garde
journals a recent article in Art Documentation. During my work at ARTstor, I’ve also had the opportunity to learn from some different use cases for collaborative cataloging across campuses. For example, Vickie O’Riordan at UC San Diego has partnered with Roger Reynolds to make his innovative intermedia work, PING available to faculty and staff on campus via Shared Shelf.

I would love to hear more about what ideas librarians might have for
collaborative cataloging practices with faculty and students and what they’re
currently doing on their campuses.

Today’s ever-growing interest in digital humanities research and teaching has coincided with an increased desire by performing artists to learn about appropriate digital tools, applications, and software in order to engage them into their performances.

Our goal is to have a community discussion that will investigate ways in which we can help foster the links between digital humanities and performance via digital social technologies and meetups, bringing together independent artists, coders, developers, big data visualization, hackers, librarians and scholars, and see how best to pair the tools and resources at our disposal to the changing needs of those creating digital performance. We also want to open the floor and hear from performing artists themselves, and explore how they want to engage/inhabit/think through these digital tools and how software/hardware can be a performance medium and not just performance enhancement.

We will be holding this session via a Google hangout, as well as at the Martin Segal Theatre, to help include the wider network of performing artists, librarians, archivists and scholars from outside the NYC Metro area.