Theater As Data

TheaTer as DaTa Theater as Data CompuTaTional Journeys inTo TheaTer researCh Miguel Escobar Varela University of Michigan Press ann arbor Copyright © 2021 by Miguel Escobar Varela Some rights reserved This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Note to users: A Creative Commons license is only valid when it is applied by the person or entity that holds rights to the licensed work. Works may contain components (e.g., photographs, illustrations, or quotations) to which the rightsholder in the work cannot apply the license. It is ultimately your responsibility to independently evaluate the copyright status of any work or component part of a work you use, in light of your intended use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ For questions or permissions, please contact [email protected] Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid- free paper First published August 2021 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data has been applied for. ISBN 978- 0- 472- 07479- 2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978- 0- 472- 05479- 4 (paper : alk. paper) ISBN 978- 0- 472- 12863- 1 (OA) DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11667458 This open access version made available by the National University of Singapore. Cover photo: From the performance Pixel by Adrien M & Claire B and CCN de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne / Compagnie Käfig—Mourad Merzouki, 2014. Photo © Raoul Lemercier. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Yong Li Lan and the rest of the Asian Intercultural Digital Archives (AIDA) team at the National University of Singapore (NUS) for providing me with a conceptual home from which to embark on the study of theater as data, and for helping me understand the problems of turning theater into digital artefacts. Paul Rae, Itty Abraham, Lonce Wyse, Eric Kerr, Maiya Murphy, Felipe Cervera, and the late John Richardson all read portions of this book and gave me invaluable feedback. At NUS, I would like to thank the Digital Cultures reading group at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Quantitative Reasoning faculty members at the interdisciplinary Univer- sity Scholars Programme for their conversations, feedback, and support. The University Scholars Programme and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences both provided financial support for making this book available through an open access and I am very grateful for this. While this is not a book about the Indonesian performing arts, the traditions of Java do feature in some parts of this book. My understand- ing of these traditions has been shaped by many people, but I am especially indebted to Jan Mrázek, Eddy Pursubaryanto, Bima Slamet Raharja, Bernard Arps, Kathryn Emerson, Novi Marginingrum, Ki Catur Kuncoro, Dewi Ambarwati, Ki Aneng Kiswantoro, Ki Ananto Wicaksono, Matthew Cohen, the late Ki Slamet Gundono, and the late Ki Ledjar Soebroto for bringing me closer to the performing arts of Java. I would also like to thank Imam Maskur for allowing me to use the Kluban data on wayang kulit performances. In Singapore I would like to thank The Necessary Stage, Centre 42, and The Flying Inkpot for letting me use their data. The journeys of this book began in earnest when Gea Oswah Fatah Parikesit at the Department of Engineering Physics, Gadjah Mada Univer- sity in Indonesia first invited me to work with him in a collaborative project vi • Acknowledgments in 2014. It was then that I first saw how theater scholars can have produc- tive collaborations with scientists. Thank you mas Gea, for your support, intellectual generosity, and for your willingness to engage with researchers across the disciplinary divide. I am also thankful to Andrew Schauf and Luis Hernández- Barraza, with whom I continued this collaborative jour- ney and learned more about network science and biomechanics. The global digital humanities community has accompanied and sup- ported me in this methodological wayfaring. I am especially thankful to Clarisse Bardiot, Alex Gil, Isabel Galina, Sean Pue, Padmini Ray Murray, David Wrisley, Ernesto Priani, Christof Schöch, Radim Hladík, Frank Fischer, and Paul Spence. I’m also very happy to be part of the incipi- ent DH community in Singapore, and I’m grateful for the conversations with, and support from, Kenneth Dean, Lim Beng Choo, Andrea Nanetti, Michael Stanley-Baker, Feng Yikang, Sayan Bhattacharyya, and the Digital Scholarship team at the NUS Libraries. It has been an honor to work with the team at University of Michigan Press. Thank you to LeAnn Fields for believing in this project. Last but not least, I wish to thank my family in near and far places. Thanks to my parents for being such inspiring and supportive role mod- els on how to be academic researchers in today’s world. Thanks to Dari for her useful feedback on interaction design and visualizations. My wife, Yingting, provided me with moral support throughout the writing of this book, and helped me better understand how scientists use data in their daily work. Sofia is too young to realize this, but she brought enormous joy to the process of writing the words that follow. Contents Introduction: In Pursuit of Theater’s Digital Traces 1 Part 1: Pre- departure Reflections 1 Toward a More Nuanced Conversation on Methodology 23 2 The Roles of Statistics 41 3 The Roles of Visualizations 57 Part 2: Guided Tours 4 Words as Data 75 5 Relationships as Data 94 6 Motion as Data 116 7 Location as Data 141 Part 3: Ensuring the Journeys Continue 8 The Imperative of Open and Sustainable Data 163 9 The Roles of Software Programming 180 viii • Contents Appendix A: Data Biographies 189 Appendix B: Technical Glossary 193 References 195 Index 219 Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11667458 Introduction In Pursuit of Theater’s Digital Traces I am on my way to the theater, and I can’t stop generating data. When I use public transport, consult a map on my phone, and order a coffee at the theater foyer, I am leaving digital breadcrumbs of my activities behind me. The data points that have resulted from these activities will be aggregated with those generated by thousands of other people. Collectively, these datasets will shape the experience of riding buses, consulting maps, and ordering coffee for myself and others. From a technological perspective, it is doubtlessly exciting that data can be applied to such diverse aspects of life. But there are many complex ethical and political corollaries to this intense collection and use of data. Data is not only useful for optimiz- ing bus routes and coffee pricing, it can also be used to increase social inequality (O’Neil 2016, 94) and to sway elections (Morgan 2018). We live in a world that is made for data and from data, as data shapes us in more ways than one. As Ribes and Jackson (2013) note, “we have entered into a symbiotic relationship with data— remaking our material, technological, geographical, organizational, and social worlds into the kind of environ- ments in which data can flourish” (52). I finish my coffee, switch off my phone, and enter the performance space. It seems like I have entered a data-free sanctuary and left the world of data and its ominous potentials behind. After all, the creative decisions that shape performances are most likely not driven by data. While data- driven content is becoming increasingly common in films and television (Suri and Singh 2018), and data plays a role in the marketing and selec- tion of performances, I can’t find any documented instance where the decisions about what happens on stage were shaped by data, not even in commercial productions. There are many performances which are about data, such as Of All of the People in All of the World by Stan’s Café (2008), 2 • TheaTer as DaTa where grains of rice are used to represent population statistics. However, creative decisions (lighting, casting, modes of interacting with the audi- ence) are not decided by data. This is certainly not the case in the intimate, experimental productions and cultural performances to which the bulk of scholarly attention is devoted to. Likewise, most theater scholarship is focused on specific, thoroughly contextualized performance events. The- ater and performance scholars deploy interpretive methods to study the performances that interest us. We don’t usually make use of data— in the information science sense— in order to seek answers to our questions or to orient our discussions. That is, until recently. With the advent of the digital humanities (henceforth DH), and the pioneering work of several researchers, using data is becoming more common in theater scholarship. This does not mean surrendering our methods to the nefarious potentials of data, but combining data and criti- cal insight to offer fresh perspectives. For example, Holledge et al. (2016) have used a comprehensive dataset of A Doll’s House performances to offer new insights into the global spread of Ibsen’s masterpiece. Using network analysis, Trilcke et al. (2015) have identified previously unreported patterns in the interaction of characters in German drama across several centuries. Schöch (2017) has identified clear genre differences in the words used by classical French playwrights. Caplan (2017) has used network data to show that Yiddish theater performers are far more influen- tial in popular entertainment that they are usually credited for.

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