Name: Professor Sarah Whatley (Principal Investigator), Dr Paul Allender (Senior
Research Fellow), Mr Ross Varney (Research Assistant)
Institutional Affiliation: Coventry University
Mode of presentation: Progress Report
Digitizing Siobhan Davies Dance: new synergies in archiving performance
Introduction
This presentation will provide a progress report on Siobhan Davies Dance Online: an
AHRC-funded project that is a collaborative venture between researchers at
Coventry University and one of Britain’s leading dance companies: Siobhan Davies
Dance. The funding has been provided to create an online, fully searchable digital
archive of the outputs, related artefacts and scholarly accounts of the Company. The
digital archive will not only preserve many valuable materials that are vulnerable in
their current state through the collation and digitisation process but will also provide
unprecedented access to Davies' work in a way that has not been possible before.
Hence, the archive will significantly enhance the quality, range and availability of
materials to researchers in the dance and performing arts related fields.
"The form and content of the archive is intended to present and represent the
work of Siobhan Davies Dance, not just to simply produce a catalogue of work.
Through this process of digitisation we hope to present tremendous
opportunities to develop imaginative and creative approaches to the concept of
an archive, whilst raising the profile of contemporary dance in the UK and
preserving it for future generations."
(http://siobhandavies.com/index.php/parent/67/item/481)
As a unique collaboration between an academic institution and an established highprofile dance company, the intention is for the archive to be a living extension of the
Company's artistic development, both retrospectively and contemporaneously.
The Progress Report, four months into a 30-month project, will focus on the
challenges that have faced the research team to date and which are inherent in the
construction of metadata when dealing with dance objects for archiving purposes.
The report will address questions that arise from what is in effect a curatorial
process and how the artist’s work is represented through the archive and particularly
the construction of metadata. Technological challenges and issues surrounding
copyright will also be discussed. The report will also point to the opportunities that
arise from the digitisation process; particularly in this case the creation of new and
original analytic methods and commentaries, and the impact the archiving process
may have on Davies’ choreographic process and the interpretation of choreographic
method in a wider sense. Finally, the report will draw attention to the researchers’
questions surrounding the contextualisation of the dance objects and how the
archive will capture and preserve the temporal and spatial nature of the dance
events, which are by nature largely ephemeral.
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Methodological issues
Four months into the project, the team is currently in the final stages of deciding
upon an appropriate Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. This is one of the
most crucial decisions to be made during the project and has therefore demanded
considerable research. At a basic level, the particular criteria to be focused on
throughout the project are: the comprehensive searchability of rich media assets (in
a performing arts context), the storage and future preservation of both original and
digitised artefacts and a graphic user interface (GUI) that delivers the media
content, in such a way as to echo the working practices of Siobhan Davies Dance
and be engaging to a variety of different users. Key to the success of these goals will
be the quality and depth of metadata used to describe each artefact residing within
the repository which therefore allows its retrieval through various search functions.
In simple terms, metadata is data about data. Combined, it creates a database that
allows users to find, make sense of and cross reference all of the items in a given
repository.
Current issues surrounding metadata production include the complexities that many
standards require of the data compiler, particularly when there is little or no existing
digital information to work from, making the cost and time required to produce
effective information prohibitive. It is therefore crucial that work flows and levels of
automation are properly considered before undertaking the metadata cataloguing of
large amounts of material. Another consideration is the role of the cataloguers (or
perhaps more aptly the curators) of the database as their subjective inputting
decisions will have a substantial impact of the effectiveness and objectivity of the
collection in its entirety. Alongside this is the seemingly endless number of criteria
that could potentially be applied to any given object/artefact depending upon the
perceived future use of the object. For example, one user may be interested in the
artists or performers of a production; another may be entirely focused on the
costumes and costume designer whilst another may be interested in contextual
information. As part of the research process, user groups are being consulted to
influence decisions at this stage.
Outcomes and Outputs
The project runs for 30 months from January 2007. The team’s view is that the
project offers a number of unique opportunities and research potential. The project
itself was conceived initially through a first-hand observation of the lack of available
research material and resources to support the performing arts academic
communities in their research. This problem seemed to be compounded by the poor
quality of the material that was available from private and company collections, with
the matter of preservation not having been considered or not financially viable in the
performing arts sector. Sarah Whatley, Principal Investigator for the project, has
conducted research into Davies’ work for many years and this led to discussions on
how to begin to remedy this problem and how to capture the work of Siobhan
Davies Dance that will preserve a collection that in totality spans 30 years of British
contemporary dance.
The team is ambitious in its aims for the user interface of the archive, but are
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equally aware of the limitations implicit in delivering a large quantity of mixed media
in an online environment and not imposing an overly complex or visually confusing
graphic user interface. Similarly, whilst the core audience will probably be the
academic research community, is the aim is to also bring the work of Siobhan Davies
to the attention of the wider public. This seems to suggest that a public ‘front end’
web interface with limited content and more general interest themes could link to a
subscription-based academic area where advanced search options and additional
content are available.
The value to students, dance audiences and the research community will be an
accessible resource, providing a novel way of interacting and engaging with this
important body of work. In turn, the project offers the opportunity to develop
working practices and methods specifically related to delivering performance-based
content online to a variety of users with a number of specific needs and preferences,
perhaps resulting in the development of a more suitable metadata standard to be
used in the description of performance materials.
Key to the development of the archive is the complex issue of copyright, which is
still an uncomfortable match with the WWW. The team is working towards
establishing a model of collaboration that protects the intellectual property of
individuals, but that in its archival content benefits the artists, the users and the
collection as a whole, and might therefore be used as an exemplar in future
projects.
So, we aim to create an archive whose form, as well as content, reflects and represents the work of the dance company. One way in which it will do this is by
employing a lively and engaging design and, perhaps more importantly, we would
like the users’ experience of the archive to reflect the processes that the company
use to create dance. As such, choreographic games and other interactive features
will form an important element of the archive. Going back to the quote from the
SDD website at the beginning of this submission, we aspire to create a digital
archive that re-presents the work of the Siobhan Davies Dance Company in such a
way that it constitutes an output of the company’s work rather than a mere ‘back
catalogue’ of their activities to date.
The team is researching other digital archive projects but there appear to be no
performance-based repositories that are offering the scale and diversity of media
that is to be made available through the Siobhan Davies Online Archive. However,
there are other fledging projects in development and the team hopes to work in
close co-operation with other project teams to ensure the validity and future
development of similar projects.
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