STAGE: From Stage to Data, the Digital Turn of Contemporary Performing Arts Historiography

Introduction

Digital sources are one of the most significant challenges facing performing arts historiography. At the intersection of history, epistemology, and digital humanities, STAGE’s key goal is to move performing arts studies into a digital context to establish a new historiography of mise en scène and their creative processes in Europe since WWII.

Theoretical Framework

It proposes a groundbreaking theoretical and methodological framework merging:

• Culture analytics
• Actor-network theory
• Data modeling
• Computer vision

This framework aims to challenge conventional approaches to the paradigm shift of digital traces in performing arts studies. I call this new field “performing arts analytics.”

Methodological Innovation

STAGE will allow a Copernican revolution of our methodologies by combining:

1. Close reading with distant reading and distant viewing
2. Hypothesis-driven with data-driven analysis
3. Hermeneutics with artificial intelligence, computer vision, and digital humanities
4. Qualitative interpretation with quantitative evidence

Project Development

STAGE will build from the Avignon festival collection before opening to larger corpora to scale up our results and expand our analysis.

Research Focus

Through the two prisms of influence and collaboration, STAGE will reveal:

• Creation contexts and networks
• Aesthetic influences
• Creative process models in an unprecedented way

Goals and Outcomes

It will make it possible to:

• Test new algorithms for medium-sized corpora
• Develop a new approach to studying collaborations over time through digital traces
• Demonstrate the potential of a data-driven approach and interdisciplinary research in humanities
• Create accessible corpora for future research
• Demonstrate the importance of digital traces for cultural heritage and research projects

Transferability and Impact

STAGE is transferable in that it will create widely open science tools, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks. It will be of value to historians and art historians who explore digital traces of the past, promising a potential impact beyond performing arts studies.