Digital Scholarship Roundtable: The State of the Field

In the seventy-fifth anniversary issue of Theatre Journal, former editor Joanne Tompkins in her essay “The Digital Turn: Research and Publishing in Theatre Journal” presents a grippingly thorough historization of the launch of the journal’s online platform in 2016, a key milestone in its development. She describes the initial plans for the online platform in what she calls a “two-part structure” that “presents the most straightforward narrative”: “essays that focus on theatre that is about or incorporates digital practices in the first instance, and essays on theatre that deploy digital methodologies as part of the structure of their critical endeavors.”¹ However, she also states that for theatre and performance practice and research more generally, “it does need to be [more] complicated” than the two-parter.² In response to Tompkins’s article and to the digital turn in theatre and performance in general, Sissi Liu, current chair of ATHE-ASTR Excellence in Digital Scholarship Award Committee, has invited prominent scholars and former chairs/committee members to reflect together on the state of the field of digital scholarship in theatre and performance. Each contributor addresses a complicated issue or takes on a series of productive questions: What kinds of digital scholarship are currently out there and how do we conceptualize them (Liu)? What questions might we ask to assess the current state of digital scholarship (Derek Miller)? Why should we all write/perform born-digital articles and how do we do so (Erin B Mee)? When is a widespread shift coming for digital methods in theatre, dance, and performance (Kate Elswit)? The roundtable concludes with an overview of how digital scholarship across the field in the past twenty-five years has shifted and evolved from digitalization to datafication (Sarah Bay-Cheng). Together, these contributions offer perspectives on what the field looks like now and where it is going.

A Taxonomy of Digital Scholarship

Sissi Liu

Digital: using computer technology to generate, store, and process data; the opposite of analog. Scholarship: the production of new knowledge. When the two combine, the result is much larger than the sum of its parts, promising endless possibilities. Digital scholarship in theatre and performance studies has been growing since the early 2000s (see Sarah Bay-Cheng’s reflections below), and especially since 2015, when several theatre journals launched online sections and ATHE and ASTR together established the Excellence in Digital Scholarship Award. Since the COVID-19 global pandemic began in 2020, high demand in online platforms and new technologies has spurred a further proliferation of many forms of digital scholarship for a larger audience. As the shape of digital scholarship constantly evolves, an up-to-date taxonomy is needed to help conceptualize its many forms to navigate through the flux and to offer a key to understanding the state of the field.

Having served on the ATHE-ASTR Excellence in Digital Scholarship Award Committee for the past four years, I observe four fluid and intertwined categories of digital scholarship at present and in the foreseeable future: the disseminating, the searchable, the analytical, and the performative (fig. 1).³ The disseminating—a mostly non-data-centric category (where data assists the argument but is not the center of scholarly concern)—documents and shares information in the form of digital publishing; it is the closest to traditional scholarship, preserving its merits while generating new modes of scholarship in a digitized environment. The searchable comprises digital archives and databases, many of which start from manually digitizing, cataloging, and transforming print materials into datasets. The analytical, a data-centric category (in which both the form and content of the project centers on data), presents analyzed or processed data rather than raw data, using digital methodology and data science approaches. The performative, either data-centric or not, “performs” data with an emphasis on user experience and leans toward a creative performative project. Such categorization considers ways of treating data (raw, processed, or performed, each more technologically demanding than the one before) and the relations among scholars/creators and their readers/audience.

Most of the current digital scholarship in theatre and performance belongs to the first category, the disseminating, which includes scholarship published on a digital platform such as podcast (versus traditional reviews and interviews), digital portal (versus analog newspaper and media), digital journal, etc. From 2020 to 2024, 67% of the submissions of ATHE-ASTR Digital Award fall into the first category, and out of these submissions, a mere 14% of these projects center on minoritarian subjects. Important cases include the theatre and performance studies top podcast On TAP (since 2016), cofounded by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Harvey Young, and Pannill Camp, and the globally influential The Theatre Times (online portal since 2016), cofounded by Magda Romanska and Beatriz Cabur. In addition, The Journal of Embodied Research (digital journal since 2017), an open access platform led by Ben Spatz, disseminates embodied knowledge through peer-reviewed video articles. Theatre Journal was among the very first to establish an online section (spearheaded by Joanne Tompkins and Jen Parker-Starbuck in 2015) to give voice to alternative approaches to knowledge production including think pieces and artist interviews. Contemporary Theatre Review launched its online section “Interventions” in 2014, while Theatre Topics also started its online section in 2015.

The second category, the searchable, comprises digital archives (primarily non-data-centric) and digital databases (data-centric). Digital archives—usually non-data-centric, despite their analog methodology of manually digitizing print material and videos—play a vital role in preserving theatre and performance histories and traditions, especially underrepresented materials never previously seen on video or online. Significant digital archives include “The Aural/Oral Dramaturgies” (a born-digital audio and video archive on dramaturgies of speech and sound led by Duška Radosavljević, 2020-22); “Global Shakespeares” (video and performance archive codirected by Alexa Alice Joubin and Peter S. Donaldson, 2011-present); and “Pioneers of Chinese Dance” (a digital photograph archive created by Emily Wilcox and Liangyu Fu, 2014-17).⁴ The user may navigate digital archives by year, subject, or geographical regions and use search engines to access target information. The data-centric counterpart of a digital archive is a digital open-source database. It is a structured set of data—oftentimes digitized manually—that is stored in ways that maximize flexibility, efficiency, or data standardization. An excellent case is “The London Stage Database” (since 2017), led by Mattie Burkert, an open-access modern relational database, a form that minimizes redundant storage to enable users to search and browse multifaceted information with a great number of filters. The database allows for full dataset download in SQL (Structured Query Language), JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), XML (Extensible Markup Language), and CSV (Comma-Separated Values) forms for exploration and analysis. For digital databases, the user is able not only to navigate and search but also to download data for analysis and interpretation. Of all the Digital Award submissions from 2020 to 2024, 14% are digital archives (33% of which focus on minoritarian content) and 9.5% are digital databases (50% of which center on LGBTQ+ content, and nothing on BIPOC content), making the searchable (23.5%) the second largest category in digital scholarship.

The third category, the analytical, is usually a digital essay or website that demonstrates findings from analysis and visualization of data using either a script written in a language such as Python or R, prewritten tools such as Gephi, or visualization software such as Tableau or Looker.⁵ From 2020 to 2024, a meager 4.7% of all Digital Award submissions fall into this category. “Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry” (since 2018), led by Kate Elswit and Harmony Bench, investigates twentieth-century African American choreographer and touring performing artist Katherine Dunham and her repertory. Through building datasets from manually curating undigitized archival programs and analyzing and visualizing these datasets, the research team has generated six interactive and fifteen static visualizations and produced eight essays in leading journals, edited volumes, and conference proceedings.⁶ This output has largely shifted interdisciplinary conversations about how dance can inform data-centric approaches that substantiate and complicate embodied knowledge. Other significant analytical projects with special emphasis on visualization include Derek Miller’s “Visualizing Broadway” (since 2014) and Debra Caplan’s “Visualizing the Vilna Troupe” (2016-18).

The fourth category, the performative, for which theatre and performance scholars and artists have a natural proclivity, is the most interactive of all four categories and will likely be the most in-demand form of scholarship in decades to come. These projects may be more productively read or experienced in digital form than in print form; they support user interaction and prioritize user experience. Over a decade ago, digital humanists such as Tom Scheinfeldt were already claiming that digital methods could lead to new forms of scholarship—which Scheinfeldt termed “performative humanities”—as “increasingly digital humanities work is being conceived as much as event as product or project.”⁷ Performative digital scholarship likewise may be considered as an event, either a generative web event (e.g., live tweeting and live blogging of one’s work on a project), a structured and well-crafted online event on an app or as a website, or in the form of a digital essay or book—all with a live audience. In the aforementioned projects, some already embrace performative elements: although the Journal of Embodied Research as a digital journal falls under the disseminating, the video essays in the journal are performative; so are the interactive data-centric visualizations in analytical projects mentioned above.

Performative projects can be data-centric, non-data-centric, or in between (fig. 2). Lev Manovich’s “Visual Earth” (2017) is a representative case of data-centric performative scholarship. It performs the growth of image-sharing around the world in relation to economic, geographic, and demographic differences based on a unique dataset of 270 million geotagged images shared around the world on X (Twitter at the time) between September 2011 and June 2014. An exemplary case of a non-data-centric performative piece is Erin B Mee’s open-access essay “Hearing the Music of the Hemispheres” (2016), a multimodal, multisensory, multilinear article that mirrors the experience of a performance. Mee’s analysis of the music created by sonifying the brain scans of a performance artist listening to rain can offer a performance-driven model for understanding spectatorship. A best example of a performative project in between data-centric and non-data-centric is perhaps Miguel Escobar Varela’s Theater as Data: Computational Journeys into Theater Research (2021), a book (in both digital and print) that takes its reader/user on an expertly planned and thorough journey to explore the world of digital humanities methods and performing arts analysis, from “pre-departure reflections” to “guided tours” and finally to “ensuring the journeys continue.” Whereas the content of the volume centers on data, the form does not; data is analogized to performance when “is/as data” echoes Richard Schechner’s familiar distinction between “is/as performance.”⁸ From 2020 to 2024, Digital Award submissions of the performative category were scarce—only 1 out of 21 submissions.

As digital scholarship moves forward, non-data-centric projects may adopt data-centric methods and approaches, and data-centric projects may take on non-data-centric forms. Likewise, the disseminating, the searchable, the analytical, and the performative will likely seep into one another. Accessibility (open and free for all) and sustainability (digital datasets and content preservation) continue to be two pressing challenges to address, both of which largely rely on institutional and philanthropic support. In terms of individual digital scholarship projects, some of the laudable projects mentioned above were self-funded at the beginning, but most benefited from institutional support at some point, as it can be costly to produce and maintain datasets and digital contents. As a field, digital scholarship in theatre and performance needs more funding, especially in currently underrepresented areas like BIPOC and LGBTQ+ digital projects. For those interested in digital projects, I hope this essay inspires them by showing the richness of what can be produced in the field. Great digital scholarship may start small—likely from a short born-digital essay (see Mee’s reflections below). As funding slowly falls into place, let us grab a laptop to enter the simulated world of theatre and performance and embrace the endless possibilities that digital scholarship promises.

On the State of Digital Scholarship in Theatre and

Performance Studies

Derek Miller

We might assess the state of digital scholarship in theatre and performance studies by asking three questions:

1. 1. Is the field producing strong, original research that relies on digital methods of some kind?

2. 2. Are digitally informed research results seen as useful for nondigital research?

3. 3. Is our scholarship sufficiently attuned to the digital context in which we all live?

To the first, the answer is a decisive “yes.” On subjects ranging from robotics and AI in performance to virtual theatre to virtual archives to my own area of data-driven history, a robust crop of new scholarship appears regularly in journals, as born-digital publications and, increasingly, as monographs. This work is diverse in subject and method and often novel in execution, but it is building on scholarship produced before digital methods of theatrical production or of academic research were widespread. Much of this research engages questions of continuing import to the whole discipline, including the political economy of performance, liveness, and social justice. Scholarship using mainly digital methods or concerned primarily with digital performance is rich and exciting.

I am less certain that the field as a whole has embraced this work. For instance, most performances today depend on our digital world for marketing, production, or the performance itself. Digital technologies are now one of the conditions of performance in the same way that Phil Auslander described televisual culture as the given situation of performance in the twentieth century.⁹ Writing about contemporary performance must grapple with the digital culture that underlies every performance event—from electronic ticketing to digital lighting equipment to word-processed scripts and more. Similarly, quantitative research helps us situate individual performances, past and present, within a far broader understanding of theatrical culture. Whether writing about thousands of plays or one play, the scale of performance history illuminated by data-driven research should inform our work. (For instance, we should no longer assert that plays about isolation grew more prominent after the pandemic without some attempt to demonstrate, quantitatively, this claim.) My sense is that both of these subjects—digital culture and the scale of cultural history, which digital scholarship addresses so astutely—are not yet woven into the fabric of our discipline. To change this, scholars not working on digital scholarship should actively engage with this work, while digital scholars must continue to explain how and why our research matters even to those committed to other methods.

Finally, are we wrestling forthrightly with the digital context of our scholarship itself? In some ways, the answer is clearly “yes.” The proliferation of born-digital projects, the embrace of hybrid conferences and other online fora, digital publishing platforms to supplement print publications, all evince a field eager to use digital technologies to improve our work and our community. But we can and should do more to bring conversations from the core of our discipline—about liveness (of course), play, texts and performances, and more—to bear upon our digital environment. As we continue to grapple with AI, social media platforms, and our increasing interdependence on computers, phones, and the infrastructures that support them, we as theatre and performance scholars have a unique perspective to offer the larger academic and the civic conversations. Theatre and performance scholarship can both benefit from and contribute to the increasingly digital world in which we all now live.

No More Print Articles!

Erin B Mee

Technology has finally caught up with performance scholars: platforms such as Scalar, Tome, and Wordpress allow us to create born-digital analyses in which we can quote gesture, choreography, facial expression, staging, and music/sound as often as we quote text. Our essays can stop being logocentric and begin to be performance-centric; we can quote movement itself instead of having to describe (or translate) it; and our essays can eschew Aristotelian linearity and embody the diversity of the dramaturgical structures we are writing about.

I am currently working on an article about participatory performance and the Sanskrit aesthetic theory of rasa. Using these digital platforms, I can show readers how participatory performance works by asking them to participate in mini performances throughout the paper. My essay is not just about something, it is something. For example, I begin the essay with the following instruction (and I offer you the same opportunity):

I invite you to taste this essay by performing Dance of Chocolate. Find a piece of chocolate, a caramel, or a piece of hard candy. Find a comfortable chair to sit in. Scan the QR code so the audio is ready. In a moment you will close your eyes so you can more fully relish your performance. After you have experienced the moment, feel free to open your eyes and keep reading. For now, close your eyes as you press play on the audio recording.

This experience sets up the following statement:

Many people who choreograph Dance of Chocolate for the first time have never thought about the possibility that a dance can take place in the mouth or that the tongue can be a choreographer. They have never thought about tasting a dance. In Dance of Chocolate you did not watch someone else dance, you were given instructions and music to create the dance yourself—simultaneously playing the roles of choreographer, dancer, and experiencer in an internal dance of flavor, smell, and mouth-feel. Dance of Chocolate is an example of multi-sensory experiential performance, which is smelled, touched, and tasted as well as seen and heard; experiential performances transform spectators and audiences into partakers by inviting them to step into the performance and surround themselves with the event, to engage the sensorium, and to relish every aspect of what they perceive—not just what they see and hear but what they feel on their skin, taste on their tongue, and grasp through proprioception. By asking partakers to ingest, relish, internalize, and personalize the event, engage as co-creators, and focus on affect, experiential performances such as Dance of Chocolate embody and literalize rasa.

I then explain what rasa is and how it functions in participatory performance. My paper, when digital, can become as multisensory as the material I am writing about. Of course, as you can see from the above QR code, I can “hack” print articles to do something similar, but born-digital articles make this both easier and richer.

Digital platforms allow our scholarship to embody our argument: in a Scalar paper about modes of spectatorship in video games, one of my students created a paper I had to play my way through—the paper was itself a game about spectatorship in gaming. The dramaturgical structure reflected the structure of games rather than that of linear print-based essays; there were interactive moments where I was asked to choose different paths, changing how and when I encountered particular parts of the analysis; the paper “cast” me in the role of a video game player and made me an active participant in the paper (which was part of my student’s point) rather than a more “passive” reader of an analysis. Writing teachers often instruct their students to “show” rather than “tell”; Scalar allowed my student to show me how spectatorship worked in gaming—I experienced his analysis rather than simply reading about it. In this way, his paper performed and embodied as well as presented his analysis in that the dramaturgical structure of the paper was based on gaming, not on linear narratives of print-based scholarship. Scalar also made it possible for another student to write a site-specific paper about site-specific performances of self in everyday life—I had to download her paper and experience it in Washington Square Park as I observed certain kinds of performances of self that she called attention to and analyzed. The fact that these papers were digital allowed my students to change the way they wrote because digital platforms changed how they wrote.

Why as a field aren’t we creating more multimedia articles, more born-digital scholarship? Why are we still stuck in/with print-bound linear narratives that don’t move or sing?

I work with Scalar. As described on its webpage (I’ve left the links intact):

Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required. . . . Scalar is a project of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (ANVC) in association with Vectors and IML, and with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.¹⁰ 

Scalar makes it easy to integrate media from multiple sources and to design your own dramaturgical structure for your scholarship.

TDR’s first Scalar article (which I confess to writing), “Hearing the Music of the Hemispheres,” won the inaugural ATHE-ASTR Excellence in Digital Scholarship Award in 2016. “Hearing the Music of the Hemispheres” is a multimodal, multilinear analysis of a concert created by sonifying the brain scans of a performance artist as she listened to music: the article analyzes the concert as music, as the perception of music, as a musical rendering of musicians’ neural responses to a series of soundscapes, as a series of portraits of the audience, and as a performed performance mode of analyzing spec-tatorship.¹¹ Music, brain scans, film clips, and interactive exercises in aural perception are integrated into the article, which you can experience here: http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/music-of-the-hemispheres/index .

TDR makes one essay from each issue available for free. Meanwhile, everything on Scalar is free; there are no paywalls. TDR made my Scalar essay available gratis, which poses an interesting challenge to the financial structures on which academic publishing is currently built, but it does make the article more accessible to those who have access to a computer. The word “accessibility,” however, has more important implications in this context. Digital scholarship addresses multiple learning styles. While recent research calls Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind (1983) and “learning styles” into question, my students (post-pandemic) have a much easier time listening to podcasts than reading print articles. In fall 2022, I audio-recorded all the print articles I assigned so students could choose whether they wanted the “podcast” version or the print version of the material. When I teach Sanskrit drama, I make videos; this allows me to show them how a word is spelled, pronounce it for them so they hear it, and see excerpts of performance. I even build in at-home participatory exercises. For example, I talk about how the eyes are trained, next they see a performer doing the exercises, then they do a modified version of the same exercise, and finally they see a video of how those exercises translate into performance. Eventually, I plan to put some of these lessons into Scalar so my students have access not just to a print article about Sanskrit drama but to something that interweaves text, audio, visual material, and participation. This is helpful not only to students with a wide variety of learning styles but to students with ADHD. Finally, if I have a student with low vision, they have access to the material through the audio; if I have a student with hearing loss, they have access through the visual material; other students have access to both. Digital scholarship makes our work more accessible.

Admittedly Scalar is not perfect: if you click on the link to my article above, you will see a few broken links I need to repair. Unlike a print article, which I don’t have to think about once it’s published, digital scholarship needs some ongoing maintenance: you have to periodically make sure that updates to the platforms and browsers have not broken things. And sometimes you have to repair things. For me, the extra effort is worth it.

Why not experience these born-digital works—and maybe others you know about or find—see what the possibilities are, and submit your proposals for a born-digital article to Sara Brady at TDR? 

The Scale of Research Has Already Changed

Kate Elswit

As I look back over the last decade of digital scholarship in theatre, dance, and performance, many of the same folks I first met in this small domain are now doing even more nuanced and interesting versions of things they have been doing previously. And yet it seems that there has not been a major sea change in terms of recentering digital methods in performance scholarship or training up a new generation of scholars, particularly with regard to the areas of research that are working toward “analysis”—to use the language of Sarah Bay-Cheng’s helpful division between collection, dissemination, and analysis—or what has been described as “argument-driven digital history.”¹² In this special section, Derek Miller similarly observes the contradiction between the strong, original work being produced in this area and the lack of uptake in the broader field.

This situation is surprising, given the ambitious scale of our field’s investment in what Harmony Bench and I are calling in the context of ASTR 2024 “big histories” for tracking change across bodies, generations, and geographies in performance.¹³ Data could come to play a critical methodological role in such recalibration as performance scholars increasingly advocate to look beyond the individual artist or moment, from repetition as method to think intergenerationally, to transnational constellations of social movement, to the more-than-human scales of performance.¹⁴ It is also surprising given that performance scholars are relying on greater amounts of material that are made available through digital tools and platforms. Here, I am thinking about everything ranging from the “crude digitization” of scholarly para-archives that now haunt so many collections to the “abundance” of born-digital and even newly digitized materials that are changing the practice of history; Ian Milligan posits that the same modest standards of evidence are just not enough in the face of such masses of information.¹⁵

Working ethically and critically with data increases more than the individual scholar’s capacity to scale as well. For a field that is so comfortable with collaborative artistic practices, there is a curious tendency to conduct research in isolation. Just as data-engaged research often relies on meaningful interdisciplinary collaborations, open data protocols enable the sharing of cultivated and curated research materials, providing stronger and more flexible pathways for us to build on the work of colleagues. To accumulate resources and expertise in pursuing projects that cross ever greater spans of time and space. So what hesitations are holding our fields back at this point? How might data methods become normalized to support the necessary project of expanding the scope of our collective storytelling? 

Party Like It’s 1999: From Digitalization to Datafication

Sarah Bay-Cheng

They say 2000, zero-zero, party over, oops, out of time So tonight, I’m gonna party like it’s 1999

—Prince, “1999” (1982)

In the relatively recent history of digital discourses, 1999 offers a compelling—if largely symbolic—cultural turning point. The significance of the millennium shift witnessed a doomsday “millenniumism,” anticipating a global Y2K meltdown when digital clocks changed from 1999 to 2000, thus creating what Andrea H. Tapia calls “a technological boundary and cultural object.”¹⁶ Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp identify the period building up to this moment as the wave of digitalization, characterized in part by a deepening “interrelatedness” among communications media and various devices.¹⁷ This techno-cultural shift informed numerous cultural projects of the late twentieth century, including the Wachowskis’ film The Matrix (1999);¹⁸ Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar’s motion-capture installation, Ghostcatching (1999), which sought to record the ephemeral physicality of dance in its digital traces;¹⁹ and the Wooster Group’s Gertrude Stein/B movie mash-up, House/Lights (1999). House/Lights was accompanied by Zoe Beloff’s CD-ROM project, Where Where There There Where (1998), a reenvisioning of the live performance as an interactive computer game. In her description of the project, Beloff aptly characterizes the moment:

This is a work [that] can only be realized through the computer, its form is also its content. Interactive cinema is itself an emerging media. Its language is in the process of being invented. This is my ongoing project. Doctor Faustus is just one starting point, a tool to give the viewer space to think about what it means to conceptualize the transformation of the world into digital form.²⁰

Thinking about the work that has been recognized through the Excellence in Digital Research and Scholarship Award, I return to Beloff’s phrasing here as a useful definition of digital research and scholarship. That is, we might define this kind of work as that which can only occur through the distinct affordances of computational methods and that helps us conceptualize the transformation of the (theatre) world into digital forms. To my mind, the best examples are projects such as Miguel Escobar Varela’s digital history analysis on Wayang Kontemporer; a website for his research that offers form presented as content. When we conceptualized the award, with the generosity of an anonymous donor, it was the intention that the award would recognize scholarly work that was fundamentally disruptive to existing methodologies and, as such, would spur innovative methods of research.

The need for these innovations has only grown since the founding of the award. As social media (or Web 2.0, the social web, etc.) proliferated, acts of theatricality (or, to quote Martin Puchner, theatricality as a value) have only increased, now saturating nearly every aspect of digital social and cultural life. People increasingly perform both consciously and compulsively for each other. Many interconnected machines and algorithms govern what entertainment we see, what other people we encounter, what products we think to purchase. Once dominant within theatre, human sensibilities of taste, desire, and choice are rapidly being displaced by algorithmic processes and data that too few of us really understand and may only dimly recognize, even as our own preferences and affinities are weaponized against us. William Uricchio outlines the consequences of algorithmic culture as tools of traditional artistic production and textual recommendation systems that become gatekeepers for textual production and “live” textual culture. “Much like the issue of intelligence,” he argues,

long-held assumptions regarding man-the-measure are undergoing a Copernican-like decentring, and in this sense, the coincidental appearance of developments such as post-humanism, actor network theory, object-oriented ontology and the rest suggests that sectors of the academy are indeed thinking seriously about a paradigm shift and alternatives to a human-centric culture.²¹

While we might champion alternatives to the biases of human-centric thinking, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reminds us of the stakes and consequences of the shift to data-driven regimes. In Discriminating Data (2021), she highlights the history and practices for decision-making systems made available through increasingly autonomous algorithmic processes. Chun observes, “it is both disturbing and revealing that methods developed for eugenics—a system that did not believe in learning—now form the basis for machine learning.”²² The consequences of these processes are still emerging in theatre and performance studies, but they will continue to affect what and how we study amid the shift from digitalization to datafication. Theatre artists such as Big Art Group, Annie Dorsen, Hasan Elahi, and Jill Magid, among others, have been experimenting with these processes in performance, while scholars such as Miriam Felton-Dansky, Jacob Gallagher-Ross, and Elise Morrison, among others, have carefully attended to these works for over a decade.²³

It is striking, then, that within scholarly works dedicated to this topic, such as The Datafied Society: Studying Culture through Data (2017), there is not a single reference to theatre, dance, or cultural performance.²⁴ The study of art, photography, cinema, literature, social computing, and more are covered in detail, while the performing arts are entirely absent. Although work in the digital humanities and cultural analytics have been expanding since the early 2000s, acknowledgement within theatre and performance studies and practice has been slower. Within the last decade, a handful of researchers have created robust research projects that put performance data at the core of theatre and performance analysis: Kate Elswit and Harmony Bench’s “Dunham’s Data” and Derek Miller’s “Average Broadway,” among others.²⁵ Varela’s book, Theater as Data: Computational Journeys into Theater Research (2021), and Miller’s recent chapter, “You’re Already a Digital Humanist: Why Aren’t You Thinking Like One?” (2024), point to the ubiquity of computational processes and opportunities within theatre and performance studies.²⁶ As Miller notes, “All scholars should care about data methods because computing underlies most contemporary scholarship.”²⁷ (Although as I write this, I note the creation of the “Big Histories” working group led by Bench and Elswit and planned for the 2024 ASTR Conference.)

The stakes for the omission of data in academic and artistic applications are high. The performing arts have long espoused their importance in community formation. In the wake of the pandemic, theatres all over the world proclaimed the joys of being back together. But, as Chun points out, targeting through social media does the opposite: “Instead of ushering in a post-racial, post-identitarian era, these social networks perpetuate angry microidentities through ‘default’ variables and axioms.”²⁸ (Her introduction is chillingly titled “How to Destroy the World, One Solution at a Time.”) Within recommender systems that are both data-driven and automated, understanding how performances are translated into data, how these data circulate on behalf of performances, how these systems construe and construct audiences, and what effects all of these have on the larger ecosystem of performance creation and analysis will be essential skills for theatre scholars and artists in the decades to come.

The emergence of generative AI in the popular consciousness has drawn helpful new attention and concern regarding how data and statistical models of culture shape creation and reception. Alongside the fascination with generative AI are justifiable concerns with data privacy, discrimination and bias, and the potential to displace whole swaths of culture workers. Because this is such a dynamic field of study, building multidisciplinary teams and incorporating a broad range of digital and data methodologies into theatre and performance studies education seem like the obvious next steps for our field. As research projects aligned with the digital humanities and data methodologies continue, it will be important to ensure that such tools and techniques are integrated into theatre and performance curricula so that emerging scholars have the fullest range of analyses available to them, and as significantly, so that they can accurately assess and evaluate data-informed research in the field.

As Jean-François Lyotard rightly predicted, “It is reasonable to suppose that the proliferation of information-processing machines is having, and will continue to have, as much of an effect on the circulation of learning as did advancements in human circulation (transportation systems) and later, in the circulation of sounds and visual images (the media).”²⁹ The digital turn ushered in attention to the historic and contemporary intersections among various forms of media and live performance and subsequently changed how and what we teach. With the ubiquity of video archives, generations of theatre- and dancemakers suddenly have more exposure to the histories of performance than ever before. As the costs of digital equipment decline, more artists have access to the tools, techniques, and affordances of intermedial performances. Over the past twenty-five years, digital scholarship and research across the field has expanded, culminating in the shift en masse to online platforms with the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic. In the wake of these shifts, and accelerated by the proliferation of social media platforms, streaming services, entertainment recommenders, and data-driven algorithmic culture, it seems as if we are on another cusp in which robust and ethical work in and through performing arts data is necessary for all of us. Or, more optimistically, maybe it’s time to party like it’s 1999. 

Footnotes

1. Joanne Tompkins, “The Digital Turn: Research and Publishing in Theatre Journal,” Theatre Journal 75, no. 4 (2023): 428–29.

2. Ibid., 429.

3. Two of the categories, the disseminating and the analytical, echo Sarah Bay-Cheng’s distinction between collection, dissemination, and analysis in “Digital Historiography and Performance,” Theatre Journal 68, no. 4 (2016): 507–27.

4. For projects with both a start date and an end date, (xxxx-xxxx) means that they have not updated the database/website since the end date. For projects with only a start date, “since xxxx” means they are still updating the database/website.

5. Derek Miller gives a detailed account of a digital humanist’s method for using data in “You’re Already a Digital Humanist: Why Aren’t You Thinking Like One?” in The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies, ed. Paul Rae and Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 125–45.

6. See https://dunhamsdata.org/portfolio/essays.

7. Tom Scheinfeldt, “Game Change: Digital Technology and Performative Humanities,” Found History, February 15, 2012, https://foundhistory.org/2012/02/game-change-digital-technology-andperformative-humanities.

8. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies, ed. Sara Brady (2002; London: Routledge, 2013), 32.

9. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999).

10. “About Scalar,” Scalar, https://scalar.me/anvc/scalar.

11. Erin B Mee, “Hearing the Music of the Hemispheres,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 3 (2013): 148–50, https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00284.

12. Bay-Cheng, “Digital Historiography and Performance”; Stephen Robertson and Lincoln A. Mullen, “Arguing with Digital History: Patterns of Historical Interpretation,” Journal of Social History 54, no. 4 (2021): 1005–22, https://doi.org/10.31835/ma.2021.01.

13. Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit, “Big Histories: Experimental Methods for Tracking Change across Bodies, Generations, and Geographies in Performance,” ASTR 2024 Conference Working Sessions, https://www.astr.org/page/24_working_sessions.

14. For example, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., and Shane Vogel, eds., Race and Performance after Repetition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Marcela A. Fuentes, Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019); Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, eds., Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

15. Eric Mayer-García, “Theorizing Performance Archives through the Critic’s Labor,” Theatre Survey 64, no. 3 (2023): 247–70; Ian Milligan, History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).

16. Andrea H. Tapia, “Technomillennialism: A Subcultural Response to the Technological Threat of Y2K,” Science, Technology & Human Values 28, no. 4 (2003): 483–512, https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243903252763.

17. Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, The Mediated Construction of Reality (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 54.

18. The Matrix, directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski (Warner Bros., 1999).

19. Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, “Ghostcatching,” OpenEndedGroup, 1999, http://openendedgroup.com/artworks/gc.html.

20. Zoe Beloff, “Doctor Faustus and the Universal Machine,” Where Where There There Where, 1998, interactive CD-ROM, http://www.zoebeloff.com/where/where_ideas.pdf.

21. William Uricchio, “Data, Culture and the Ambivalence of Algorithms,” in The Datafied Society: Studying Culture through Data, ed. Mirko Tobias Schäfer and Karin van Es (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 132–33, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1v2xsqn.

22. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021), 253.

23. Miriam Felton-Dansky, Viral Performance: Contagious Theaters from Modernism to the Digital Age (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018); Jacob Gallagher-Ross, “Image Eaters: Big Art Group Brings the Noise,” TDR: The Drama Review 54, no. 4 (2010): 54–80; Miriam Felton-Dansky and Jacob Gallagher-Ross, “Interface Theatre: Watching Ourselves Disappear,” Modern Drama 67, no. 1 (2024): 1–24; Miriam Felton-Dansky and Jacob Gallagher-Ross, “Digital Feelings,” Theater 46, no. 2 (2016): 1–5; Elise Morrison, Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016).

24. Schäfer and Van Es, The Datafied Society.

25. Miguel Escobar Varela, “Wayang Kontemporer: Innovations in Javanese Wayang Kulit,” Contemporary Wayang Archive, 2015, http://cwa-web.org/dissertation/wayang-dis/index.php; Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit, “Dance History and Digital Humanities Meet at the Archives: An Interim Project Report on Dunham’s Data,” Dance Research 38, no. 2 (2020): 289–95, https://doi.org/10.3366/drs.2020.0314; Derek Miller, “Average Broadway,” Theatre Journal 68, no. 4 (2017): 529–53, https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2016.0105.

26. Miguel Escobar Varela, Theater as Data: Computational Journeys into Theater Research (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021); Miller, “You’re Already a Digital Humanist.”

27. Miller, “You’re Already a Digital Humanist,” 125.

28. Chun, Discriminating Data, 49.

29. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (1979; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 4.