February 27, 2007

Expanding Dance Documentation to the Internet

In my previous post, I wrote about Dance Heritage Coalition's new publication, "Documenting Dance: A Practical Guide." This publication provides strategies and recommendations for how different types of dance programs can be documented, analyzed and restaged.

In this post, I would like to offer suggestions for how the Internet can be used to create new possibilities for documenting and preserving dance.

At the heart of my below recommendations is what is referred to "crowdsourcing." Crowdsourcing is the process of outsourcing a task or project to a large number of people - usually Internet users.

To apply this concept to dance: There are millions of people around the world involved with dance - that might be social dancers, folk/cultural dancers, competitive dancers, students at universities and colleges, or those involved in dance in some other manner.

Since millions of these dancers use the Internet, there's a simple question that we can ask which could never have been posed before:

How can we leverage the collective intelligence of these amateur and professional dancers to create new types of knowledge and insight for the global dance community?

Here are some of my answers to this question:

I would like to start by referring back to the seven "frameworks" I summarized in my previous post. These frameworks are the contexts in which dance documentation takes place.

The Creative Process

The creative process framework - actually referred to as "Creation" in "Documenting Dance" - is the process of documenting a new work. A case study about Merce Cunningham illustrates this framework. Essentially, a documentary film was made that captured the actual creative process for a dance work "Points in Space."

So to apply this framework to the Internet, the starting question is: How can the Internet be used by choreographers and dancers (as well as costume designers, set-designers, lighting designers and musicians) to document their early creative efforts?

One answer is to encourage more choreographers and dancers to create online blogs (journals) where they write about the creative process and how they envision their work. Even better, these blogs would include multimedia content such as pictures, audio programs and video clips to give a fuller idea of how a dance piece is developed.

This is actually what we did - without really intending to - when I worked with Peter DiMuro of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange to create a blog for Funny Uncles. You can listen to audio interviews that I conducted with Peter in which he describes his early thoughts about Funny Uncles. Plus you can watch a couple video clips from the early rehearsals - we shot a lot more than we posted.

While the main focus of this performance blog was to experiment with new approaches to communicating with dance audiences, an unintended by-product of this process is that we've documented this early creative process.

What would happen if tens of thousands of dancers and dance companies were encouraged to create their own multimedia blogs? The result would probably be complete chaos - there would be some excellent content but a lot of it would not be very worthwhile from a documentation standpoint.

This is where the professional documentation community comes into the picture. The Internet is the least expensive medium ever created for creating and distributing multimedia content. So, over time, a lot of people might be inspired to document their dances in this way.

But an overall structure and recommended guidelines would be needed from an organization such as the Dance Heritage Coalition to organize and facilitate what could easily become a haphazard and disorganized process. Actually, a number of additional steps would need to be implemented to make this work, but for now I just wanted to offer this idea.

Ethnographic Study

Crowdsourcing really becomes invaluable when we think about ways to document social, folk, ethnic and cultural dances from around the world.

In "Documenting Dance" an example is given of the documentation of sacred dances in Bhutan (you can link to Core of Culture to learn more about this project).

While there's no question that an experienced ethnographer or cultural anthropologist is ideally trained for the study of cultural dance forms, there are relatively few people with this expertise. But there are hundreds of thousands of dance forms and styles to be documented.

So why not tap into the collective intelligence of millions of dancers to document, upload, analyze and compare this huge body of dance from around the globe?

Imagine a massive website along the lines of Wikipedia (yes, Wikipedia has all kinds of problems which I'll return to) that is devoted to dance. Anybody from around the world could upload videos of different dance forms and styles as well as categorize and tag these videos.

Within a short time frame, we'd have an invaluable resource that has never existed before. Plus, it's a resource that can always be edited and updated.

Once again, an organization would be needed to create the overall structure for this site as well as provide guidance on optimal approaches to categorizing and tagging dances.

A specific example of how this multimedia dance guide could be used would be to study and compare different forms of salsa dancing. Just within the US, you have New York, LA and Miami styles. It would be great for both professionals and amateurs to explore these different styles, and others from around the globe as well as to learn what makes them unique.

Archival

Another case study deals with the Library of Congress' archival effort of The Martha Graham Collection. This initiative involved both the archiving of the donated body of work as well as creating new materials such as recording video interviews with former dancers.

There are a number of possible ways to crowdsource the creation and indexing of large collections of dance videos on a scale never before contemplated. I've written about possible approaches before. I just didn't think of these projects as documentation initiatives.

In "Deep Tagging, Linking and Searching" I wrote about two projects that use online video editing applications in conjunction with "deep tagging" and deep linking" to allow amateurs and professions to tag millions of small sections of millions of dance videos.

In the first project, I discuss how dance students at colleges and universities can join forces to categorize videos of student dance productions.

In the second project, I propose a Wikipedia-like video database of dance styles and forms. But in this case, deep linking and tagging are added as well so that scholars, dance fans and anybody else can conduct highly granular searches.

There are a couple of important benefits for both these of projects. One is that millions of links (relationships) will be created among millions of different sections of dance videos. These links can then be studied and searched to understand how dance forms are created, influenced and changed over time. This type of research simply can't be done today because it's not possible to conduct such large-scale documentation efforts without the help of the Internet, crowdsourcing and amateurs.

Additional Thoughts

These types of documentation projects open up huge opportunities for dance archivists, researchers, historians and others who study dance.

Implementing such large-scale initiatives, however, does lead to a host of questions and challenges:

- What does it mean to involve possibly millions of amateur dancers in the documentation process?

- How can these data-intensive efforts be structured and facilitated in such a way that the content and organization of this material in meaningful and helpful from a documentation standpoint?

- How do you ensure a certain level of quality control when creating Wikipedia-like services? Are there ways to create different types of user rights and privileges so that there is some control over who works on specific projects?

- How can an organization such as DHC create a database/information infrastructure that would allow for the indexing and archiving of this large amount of dance-related content? Who would invest in such an infrastructure?

Trackback Pings