Original file was afterFeedback tex

Language Documentation: A Reference Point for Theatre and Performance Archives?

Miguel Escobar Varela 1^a and Nala H. Lee ^a

^aDepartment of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore

Abstract

Digital documentation is increasingly important for theatre and performance studies. However, there are still relatively few digital theatre and performance archives and many of them are not yet equipped to realize the full potential of digital documentation; they have been slow to adopt standards for data reusability, findability and interoperability. A field that provides a competing example is language documentation, even though this comparison might not readily strike performance scholars as immediately apparent. While there are a number of important differences, this article suggests that some aspects of language documentation might be relevant to the documentation of performance. Language documentation is still an incipient field but it has a more stable set of tools at its disposal. This article was written as a collaboration between a language documentation practitioner and a theatre scholar. It is our contention that both performance and language documentation can borrow from each other's technical and conceptual toolkits, a possibility that has been largely ignored to date in both disciplines. We hypothesize the reasons behind this omission and offer some suggestions of how a conversation across these disciplines might begin, by focusing on a case study where a language documentation perspective improves the functionality of a theatre documentation project.

1 Introduction

Digital documentation is increasingly important for theatre and performance studies. Performance documentation includes a range of activities (from ethnography to audiovisual recordings), the outcome of which can be shared in a variety of ways (from books to museum exhibitions). Here, though, we are primarily concerned with digital documentation (regardless of format or approach) that is publicly shared in the form of online archives. The reason for this focus is that such archives have become increasingly popular and we believe that their impact on performance scholarship will become even more apparent in the futureⁱ. However, there are still relatively few archives and many of them are not yet equipped to realize the full potential of digital documentation; they have been slow to adopt standards for data reusability, findability and interoperability. In Table Error: Reference source not found, we summarize certain features of prominent online theatre archives, as displayed on their online portals. The list is not comprehensive but it includes theatre archives that have been mentioned in the ADHO (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations) conference and IFTR (International Federation for Theatre Research) Digital Humanities Working Group from 2015 to the present. There are inherent differences in the material contained in them, but we believe the questions we looked at don't presuppose a specific kind of material, and apply equally well to text-based as movement-based archival collections. The questions used to construct the table were:

1. Do the archives have guidelines for citation of individual objects?

2. Is there a policy for deposition?

3. Is content reusable?

4. What is the copyright license?

The information in Table Error: Reference source not found was obtained via a thorough examination of the archives' web portals. We did not contact the makers of these archives but rather utilized displayed information that was available to a regular user, as of July 2017. ⁱⁱ This information might not fully reflect the reality of the archives as conceived by their makers, but they represent the experience of the regular web visitor. For example, we noted that the metadata standards of many of the archives were "not clear". Even if the archives do utilize a standard in the backend, if this information is not directly communicated to users, this becomes a problem for the sustainability of the archives and defeats the purpose of implementing a standard (this point is further explained later in this article).

Comparison of online theatre and performance archives.

Name	Item-level Citation	Accepts Depositions	Enables Reusability	Copyright License	Metadata Standard	Access	Established
Digital Theatre Plus	No	No	No	Restricted	Not clear	Subscription(paid)	2009
Cuban Theater Digital Archive (CTDA)	No	Yes	Not clear	Creative Commons	Not clear	Open	2009
MIT Global Shakespeares	No	No	Videos are downloadable	Not clear	Not clear	Open	2010
Digital Theatre Archive	No	No	No	Not clear	Not clear	Open	Not clear
Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive(A-S-I-A)	No	No	No	Restricted	Not clear	Subscription (free)	2008
Glopad	No	No	Not clear	Not clear	GloPAD Performing Arts MetadataSchema	Open	2002
CircusOZ	No	No	[l]To some extent. Has own API	[l]Mixed	Not clear	Open	2010
Digital Dance Archives	Yes	No	No	[l]Mixed	Not clear	Open	Not clear

Although we believe that certain copyright licenses and metadata standards are more useful than others, the table does not aim to reflect our preferences but merely to show whether this basic information is displayed to the user. To give an example, let's consider the issue of reusability. In this context, we understand an item such as a video or textual transcript to be reusable when it can be used for another purpose by a user who downloads such content. We understand that this ideal reusability policy is untenable for most archives, but we think that stating clearly the bounds of reusability is a key piece of information that should be communicated to an archive's users.

We must also note that our criticism here is limited to the technical display of information in the archives. These are all exceptional projects which are widely used by theatre scholars and which are groundbreaking contributions to scholarship in their own fields. However, the table suggests that most of these archives have yet to implement best practices that will make them more useful and that will ensure their sustainability.

What is the reason for this limited application of best practices in the field of online theatre and performance archives? We hypothesize that one reason is performance scholars’ uneasy relationship to the documentation of ephemeral media (Phelan 1993; Taylor 2003). One must also acknowledge the relative newness of theatre and performance archives. Creating and maintaining digital archives still requires substantial financial investment, but the adoption of best practices does not necessarily require bigger budgets. If anything, the adoption of tested standards for sustainability ensures lower costs going forward, and greater future impact of current projects. In moving forward, we could derive inspiration from other disciplines.

An obvious place to look for such inspiration is literary studies, where digital archives have a longer history. However, literary archives provide an imperfect model. The tension between the object of study and its digital surrogates are very different in both fields. In literature, while a digital facsimile or transcript of a book might not capture certain physical traits of a book (such as weight and texture), a digital surrogate captures all words via standardized and relatively reproducible and incontrovertible procedures. With few exceptions, words are the main focus of literary scholars. In contrast, no performance document can claim to capture everything that a researcher might want to study (the audience, multiple vantage points, multiple iterations of a performance) via standardized, reproducible and incontrovertible methods. Therefore, the notion of documentation does not really apply in the same way as it does within literary scholarship. The visual arts and film also rely on relatively standard processes for documentation (with the exception of artworks which are closer to performance, such as performance art and site-specific cinema).

Another field that provides a model of documentation is that of linguistics, even though this comparison might not readily strike performance scholars as immediately fitting. Within linguistics, language documentation is a fast-emerging subfield. While there are a number of important differences, this article suggests that some aspects of language documentation might be relevant to the documentation of theatre and performance. Language documentation is still an incipient field but it has a more stable set of tools at its disposal (specialized software, journals and a wider range of repositories). This article was written as a collaboration between a language documentation practitioner and a theatre scholar. It is our contention that both performance and language documentation can borrow from each other's technical and conceptual toolkits, a possibility that has been largely ignored to date in both disciplines. We hypothesize the reasons behind this omission and offer some suggestions of how a conversation across these disciplines might begin, by focusing on a case study where a language documentation perspective can improve the functionality of a theatre documentation project. As part of this joint collaboration, an article in a language documentation journal will examine the reverse situation of the one we present here.

The lack of interaction between performance scholars and linguists has historical roots (Jackson 2004). The contested relationship of theatre and performance studies with literary studies has led to a valid suspicion of text-based research in theatre, but it has had the unfortunate effect of creating a lack of awareness of developments in fields such as language documentation. Here, we argue that adopting best practices from language documentation does not imply subscribing to a textual paradigm. A substantial part of language documentation is directed towards the documentation, annotation and preservation of oral practices through audiovisual records. We don't suggest that linguistic standards and formats should be blindly transposed to a performance context. However, a deeper understanding of the standards and histories of linguistic documentation can invigorate the practice of documentation in theatre and performance studies. Both language documentation and performance stand to gain from a nuanced conversation around the applicability of standards and best practices across disciplines. We begin with the assumption that language is important to theatre and performance scholars but it is not necessarily the only concern. If anything, theatre and performance scholars are increasingly interested in the non-linguistic aspects of performance.

This article is organized as follows:

1. A short history of documentation in language and performance.

2. A comparison of the features and practices of existing digital archives.

3. An evaluation of the Contemporary Wayang Archive in relation to concerns from both language documentation and performance studies.

4. A series of recommendations for the intersection between theatre and language archives.