International seminar on digital humanities in theatre studies:
The researcher and the digital archive. Narratives from a user-oriented approach. Digital humanities in the performing arts. Methods in research and education
Bildet er fra Nationaltheatrets oppsetning av William Shakespeares En Sommernattsdrøm. Produksjonen hadde premiere 24. februar 1973. Scenograf: Lubos Hruza. Fotograf: Frits Solvang. Fri lisens.
Friday 30th of September, Performing Arts Hub Norway is organizing an all-day seminar on digital humanities in theatre studies. We have invited theatre and dance researchers from different countries who work with digital archives as research tools.
You will receive presentations from professors, associate professors and PhD students who work with methods within digital humanities in their research and teaching. Topics to be covered include repertoire-, network-, geographical-, financial-, text- and video analysis, as well as how older theatres can be reconstructed with VR technology.
There will also be presentations on how DH is brought into the teaching of theatre studies at universities in Norway and Denmark. Program below.
The seminar is supported by ENICPA – European Network of Information Centres for Performing Arts.
PROGRAM
Time: 30th of September 2022, 9am - 4pm
Venue: Auditorium, The National Library of Norway, Henrik Ibsens gate 110, Solli Plass, Oslo
Registration: The seminar is free of charge. For in person attendance register by 23rd of September 2022 by following this link: https://forms.office.com/r/shFk1zqz9a.
The seminar can be followed by live-streaming from the National Library's website.
09.00-09.15 Arrival: coffee/tea
09.15-09.30 Welcome and introduction by Elisabeth B. Leinslie, Senior advisor and Head of Archive, Performinag Arts Hub Norway
09.30-10.00 Julie Holledge, Professor Emeritus, Flinders University, Australia
Expanding the digital parameters of performing arts research
This presentation will focus on recent additions to AusStage, the Australian Live Performance Database (www.ausstage.edu.au) and IbsenStage (https://ibsenstage.hf.uio.no). AusStage holds half a million records on Australian artists, companies, performances, and venues from 1778 to the present day. In 2021, we decided to add a new financial table to our relational database. The presentation will demonstrate how this new table, when used in conjunction with rich cultural data, can track the impact of government subsidy and private funding on the performing arts industry, and thus inform public policy in the arts.
In the second part of the presentation, the focus will shift to the application of virtual reality techniques in theatre research. Building digital models of lost theatres and using them as performance laboratories has allowed us to bring together artists and scholars to translate written documental sources into a visual and spatial form. The presentation will illustrate this work with the Ibsenstage VR model of Komediehuset, the Bergen theatre where Ibsen did his apprenticeship. https://losttheatres.net/
10.05-10.35 Annelis Kuhlmann, Associate professor Aarhus Universitet, Danmark
Danish theatre archives in the age of digitalization within research and education
This presentation has focus on the research project, Danish Theatre Archives in the Age of Digitalization in Research and in Teaching. The project was initiated in late 2019 together with three colleagues, Anna Lawaetz (The Royal Library, Copenhagen), Ulla Kallenbach (The University of Bergen), and Birthe Aagesen, (Centre for Educational Development, Aarhus University). The project was supported by IT consultants from The Royal Library and financed by the National Cultural Heritage Cluster programme about Big Data meeting Danish Cultural Heritage and by Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University. The profiles of this team with different competences would strengthen the research questions, formulated for this project, in which Ludvig Holberg’s comedies became basic text material, http://holbergsskrifter.dk/holberg-public/view?docId=adm/main.xml&lang.set=dk. Embedded in the project was a dramaturgical understanding of theatricality and performativity in decoding archival sources. The project thus investigates potentials of implementing digital tools and methods in order to maintain living theatre archives.
This presentation will draw a picture of challenges and impacts achieved from this research, located in-between research-based teaching and teaching-based research. The framing of this presentation will draw on different contexts of applicability within my practice as teacher in theatre history for first year dramaturgy students.
10.35-11.05 Break: coffee/tea
11.05-11.25 Gianina Druta, Associate professor, OsloMET, Oslo.
Teaching Digital Humanities with IbsenStage
The aim of this presentation is to cast light on some of the aspects involved when teaching about digital humanities’ use in theatre research. I will focus on the use of IbsenStage database as research and teaching tool in the context of the sessions that I taught in the course “New Perspectives in Ibsen Studies” at the Centre for Ibsen Studies in the Spring semester of 2020, 2021 and 2022. My teaching aims to introduce humanities students who have been trained in qualitative research methodologies to quantitative techniques of analysis they can use in theatre research. For this purpose, I focus on teaching them how to curate their own datasets and how to translate the data into visualisations such as graphs and maps. This practical experience is then taken one step further as the teaching focuses on how the students can formulate their own research questions using IbsenStage, and interpret the patterns produced by the data visualisations in qualitative research for their semester assignments. Finally, the teaching does not encourage the students to substitute qualitative approaches with quantitative analyses. Instead, it aims to enrich their use of close reading methodologies with distant reading methodologies in their research projects.
11.30-12.00 Anna Lawaetz, The Royal Library, Denmark.
Voice recordings and Digital Humanities: Hidden ideals of voice discovered through acoustic analysis
Doris Kolesch and Sybille Krämer has named the vocal performance as an event (Kolesch & Krämer, 2006). Through the voice we transmit words but also the performative parameters tempo, timbre, pitch and breath. With the introduction of recording technology about 140 years ago it became possible to capture the human voice. The development of the recording technology since the 1990s has made it possible for everybody to do recordings, and also to begin to analyze the voice not only in linguistic studies, but also in cultural studies. Based on acoustic analysis of more the 100 continuity announcers this paper presents a method to compare different voice recordings across gender and recording technologies that reveal hidden cultural ideals of voice. Furthermore, it points at some of the challenges we as researchers are faced with when analyzing historical voice recordings from theatre performances and radio drama.
12.05-12.35 Clarisse Bardiot, Professor at Université Rennes 2, France
Theatre Analytics: from close reading to distant viewing of video recordings
Video recordings are one of the most significant traces of performing arts. They are fundamental for research but also for teaching the history of contemporary theater. Today, many artists post them on YouTube or Vimeo. Nevertheless, the profusion and availability of videos do not prevent the fact that it is still important to comment and explain them in a close reading approach. This presentation will focus first on MemoRekall, a free and open-source web app to annotate a video by adding notes, documents, or web links. Today, the thousands of performing arts video recordings and the advances in computer vision carry out the promise of « distant viewing ». In a second step, this presentation will present state of the art in distant viewing for video analysis and its potential for performing arts. Finally, it will explore how computer vision renews traditional questions of performing arts studies and raises new research questions.
12.35-13.35 Lunch
13.35-14.05 Jens-Morten Hanssen, Head of Section, The National Library of Norway
Using data analysis to interrogate the global dissemination of Jon Fosse
During the 1990s Jon Fosse went from being a prose writer with a limited Norwegian audience to becoming a playwright with an ever-expanding global distribution. His current international standing is closely connected to the fact that he began to write dramatic texts. The National Library recently received a large archive of material related to Fosse’s authorship. Data from more than 700 theatre productions based on his plays have been entered collaboratively into the Sceneweb database. In this paper I will use network analysis and geographical analysis to shed light on Fosse’s global dissemination.
14.10-14.30 Linnea Buerskogen, PhD student at the Center for Ibsenstudies, University of Oslo, Norway
A distant look through a close reading lens: searching for patterns in the English versions of Henrik Ibsen’s modern dramas.
Henrik Ibsen was made international through the distribution and performances of the translated versions of his plays. Previous research on the translations of Ibsen’s works has traditionally had a close-reading-focus. My approach will be a combination of close and distant reading, using Text Mining tools on a corpus of 115 English translations of his works. This way I hope to accomplish new research and a new view on the influence the translations of Ibsen’s works has had on the internationalization of Ibsen as a play writer. Using methods connected to stylometry and Text Mining will make it possible to uncover structures in the translations that traditional close reading alone cannot display. My curiosity lies in discovering the so far unnoticed and uninterpreted qualities of the translations. In this presentation, I will demonstrate some of my methods when applying Text Mining Tools onto the corpus of translations. I hope to show what role digital archives such as Nasjonalbiblioteket (www.nb.no) have for my research, and how these archives open for new possibilities in terms of methods available for the researcher.
14.35-15.05 Ulla Kallenbach, Associate Professor University of Bergen, Norway
Digital challenges and possibilities in theatre research
Digital technologies are currently and radically changing the way theatre scholars research and teach theatre. Changes include new forms of documentation, archives, methods of analysis as well as new forms of teaching and dissemination. Furthermore, digital technologies are changing theatre itself, offering new forms of experience and participation as well as new subjects to study. Not least, the digital paradigm challenges the paradigm of presence, which has hitherto been at the core of theatre and performance as a physical encounter between actors and spectators. What possibilities do the digital technologies offer to theatre scholars and what are their drawbacks? In this paper, I will discuss the possibilities and challenges that I encounter in my own practice as a theatre researcher and the didactical challenges that I face as a teacher – focusing in particular on the disciplines of theatre history and dramaturgy – under the headlines: 1) digital archives and materials; 2) digital methods of analysis; and 3) digital formats of dissemination.
15.05-15.30 Questions and closing
ABOUT
Julie Holledge has published extensively in the field of women’s performance and is author of Innocent Flowers: Women in Edwardian Theatre (Virago 1981); and co-author of Women’s Intercultural Performance (Routledge 2000). As Professor 2 at the University of Oslo (2011-2020), she published three books on Ibsen: A Global Doll’s House: Ibsen and Distant Visions (Palgrave 2016); Ibsen Between Cultures (Novus forlag 2016) and Ibsen on Theatre (Nick Hern 2018). She is a co-founder of AusStage and Ibsenstage and has pioneered the use of VR technology in theatre research.
Annelis Kuhlmann is Associate Professor at Dramaturgy, Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research interests cover a variety between fields like theatre archives, theatre and performance historiography and exploration of tools for dramaturgical analysis. Lately, ‘The first Danish production of Hamlet (1813): A theatrical representation of a national crisis’ came out in Disseminating Shakespeare in the Nordic Countries (The Arden Shakespeare 2022). She has been interested in digital humanities in theatre studies since her PhD dissertation, Stanislavsky’s theatre concepts (1997), based on studies in Stanislavsky Archives in the Moscow Art Theatre.
Gianina Druta is Associate Professor of drama and theatre at Faculty of Education and International Studies, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. She took her Ph.D with a thesis on Ibsen’s early performance history in the Romanian theatre at the Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo. Her research activity focuses on Scandinavian literature, theatre studies and Digital Humanities. She has been working with the IbsenStage database since 2015.
Anna Lawaetz, PhD, is responsible for the Performing Arts Collection at the Royal Danish Library. She is the founder and leader of the Working Group for digital acquisition for performing arts archives (SIBMAS). In her PhD Stemmebrug og stemmeidealer i Danmarks Radio 1925-2012 (University of Copenhagen 2014) she developed digital methods for analyzing voice recordings in cultural studies. She is author of the Sound Studies course unit 2 and unit 3 at DARIAH Teach, where some of her methods for voice analysis are available as tutorials. She is currently conducting a research project on new curatorial strategies for performing arts archives (KFU 2018-22). Together with Ulla Kallenbach she has edited Stage/Page/Play – Interdisciplinary Approaches to Theatre and Theatricality (Multivers, 2017).
Clarisse Bardiot is a Professor at Université Rennes 2 in the history of contemporary theatre and digital humanities. Her research focuses on theatre analytics, the history, and aesthetics of digital performance, the relationship between art, science, and technology, the preservation of digital works, and experimental publishing. With a team of developers, she designed digital environments for performing arts preservation and documentation: a software prototype, Rekall, and a web app, MemoRekall. She is the author of the book Performing Arts and Digital Humanities. From Traces to Data (Wiley / Iste, 2021).
Jens-Morten Hanssen is Head of Section at the National Library of Norway. He earned a PhD degree at the University of Oslo in 2018 with a doctoral thesis on the early reception of Ibsen on the German stage.
He is the author of Ibsen on the German Stage 1876–1918: A Quantitative Study (Narr FranckeAttempto Verlag, Tübingen 2018) and articles such as ‘Ibsen and the Repertory System: Peer Gynt on the German Stage’ (2020) and ‘Digital Humanities and Theatre Studies: New Perspectives on the Early Reception of Ibsen on the German Stage’ (2018).
Ulla Kallenbach, PhD, is Associate Professor in Theatre Studies, University of Bergen, and President of the Association of Nordic Theatre Scholars. Her monograph, The Theatre of Imagining – A Cultural History of Imagination in the Mind and on the Stage (Palgrave 2018) was the first comprehensive study of the cultural history of imagination in the context of theatre and drama. She currently leads the research project Artistic Exchanges: The Royal Danish Theatre and Europe, which uses digital methods to investigate artistic exchange, cultural mobility and performative representations of Europe through the unique archive of the Royal Danish Theatre.
Linnea Buerskogen is a first year PhD student located at the Centre for Ibsen Studies in Oslo. She graduated from NTNU in Trondheim with her master thesis on the German translations of Ibsen’s Ghosts. Other fields of interest are the modern breakthrough in Norwegian literature, postmodern theatre and Scandinavian children’s literature.