Multimodal publication platforms for the performing arts

Writing about and studying the performing arts, especially for the contemporary period, means using performance video-recordings. However, these recordings are rarely communicated with the intended audience, except as supplementary materials in academic journals and books. But would it be possible to develop scholarly interfaces that interlink text and video in more complex ways? The challenges are institutional rather than purely technical. We need to agree on standards for annotation, publication, review and preservation. But every project in the performing arts is unique. Conceptual discussions in the performing arts have often been described as a “sophisticated disagreement” (Strine, Long, and Hopkins 1990). Would it be possible to extend this approach, from the conceptual to the technical? Can we develop a technical and institutional framework for sophisticated disagreement that enables the multimodal annotation annotation of performances and integrates this into a publication pipeline?In this workshop, we explore different tools for annotating and communication audiovisual, multimedia scholarship. We conduct a survey of existing projects and give an in-depth introduction to MemoRekall (Bardiot) and a recent framework for integrating interlinked text and video in ways that are easy to preserve and that have wide applicability across domains, which is used as the basis of the Asian Intercultural Digital Archiva (Escobar Varela). Both are open-source and free applications.The workshop is open to people with an interest in performing arts scholarship and to everyone looking for ways to develop multimodal publication platforms.