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ERC grant « From Stage to Data, the Digital Turn of Contemporary Performing Arts Historiography (STAGE) ».

I am thrilled to announce the successful approval of the STAGE project titled From Stage to Data, the Digital Turn of Contemporary Performing Arts Historiography (STAGE). This initiative has been granted the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant. Over the course of five years, this project will bring together a diverse team of performing arts researchers, digital humanists, and computer scientists. To provide a brief overview, the project abstract is outlined below. You can also refer to the interview issued by my university. More information to follow.

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. It proposes a groundbreaking theoretical and methodological framework merging culture analytics, actor-network theory, data modeling, and computer vision to challenge conventional approaches to the paradigm shift of digital traces in performing arts studies. I call this new field “performing arts analytics.” STAGE will allow a Copernican revolution of our methodologies combining close reading with distant reading and distant viewing; hypothesis-driven with data-driven analysis; hermeneutics with artificial intelligence, computer vision, and digital humanities; qualitative interpretation with quantitative evidence. STAGE will build from the Avignon festival collection before opening to larger corpora to scale up our results and expand our analysis. Through the two prisms of influence and collaboration, STAGE will reveal creation contexts and networks, aesthetic influences, and creative process models in an unprecedented way. It will make it possible to test new algorithms for medium-sized corpora; to develop a new approach to studying collaborations over time through digital traces; to demonstrate the potential of a data-driven approach and interdisciplinary research in humanities; to create accessible corpora for future research; to demonstrate the importance of digital traces for cultural heritage and research projects. 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.

Article mis en avant

Nouveau livre : Arts de la scène et humanités numériques. Des traces aux données

Très heureuse de présenter la publication de mon HDR Arts de la scène et humanités numériques. Des traces aux données ! Préface de Bruno Bachimont, traduction en cours en anglais chez Wiley.

Informations sur le site de l’éditeur : https://www.istegroup.com/fr/produit/arts-de-la-scene-et-humanites-numeriques/

Résumé :

Les traces numériques, qu’elles soient numérisées (programmes, carnets de notes, dessins, etc.) ou nativement numériques (mails, sites internet, captations vidéo, etc.), constituent un défi majeur pour la mémoire des éphémères arts de la scène. Le numérique transforme les traces en données et ce faisant les ouvre à la manipulation. Ce changement de paradigme appelle à un renouvellement des méthodologies pour écrire l’histoire du théâtre aujourd’hui, analyser les oeuvres et leur processus de création, ainsi que pour préserver les spectacles.

Au croisement des études théâtrales, de l’histoire et des humanités numériques, de la conservation et de l’archivistique, ces méthodologies permettent de prendre en compte ce qui est généralement écarté : à savoir les traces numériques, jugées trop complexes, trop nombreuses, trop fragiles, à l’authenticité douteuse, etc.

Avec pour fil conducteur l’analyse des traces numériques de Merce Cunningham, et au travers de nombreux autres exemples, cet ouvrage s’adresse autant aux chercheurs et aux archivistes qu’aux artistes et aux institutions culturelles.

DHnord2020 Conference. The Measurement of Images: Computational Approaches in the History and Theory of the Arts.

I’m very proud to annouce the program of the next DHnord2020 conference which I will chair with Emmanuel Château-Dutier.

https://www.meshs.fr/page/dhnord2020

Original Presentations

(Pre-recorded talks available from November 1st)

  • Peter Bell, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), “Angelic movement. Exploring and Understanding Art, Iconography and Composition with Machine Learning / Mouvement angélique : Explorer et comprendre l’art, l’iconographie et la composition avec le machine learning.”
  • Dominique Cardon, Sciences Po, “The Machine that Reads Images: a Social and Technical History of Artificial Intelligence in Computer Vision / Une machine qui lit les images : une histoire socio-technique de l’intelligence artificielle en vision par ordinateur.”
  • Johanna Drucker, University of California, Los Angeles, “Image Mis-recognition: Augmentation, Automation, and Aesthetic Intelligence / Mé-reconnaissance de l’image: augmentation, automatisation et intelligence esthétique.”
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COSMIC : CO-creating and Sharing digital Methodologies in Circus Education

Summer of good news : the Erasmus + COSMIC project has been accepted !

The COSMIC project aims at enhancing the quality of circus education and training, on the same line of previous FFEC and FEDEC projects INTENTS and REFLECT. The project will be an exchange of good practices that will allow professional Circus schools to develop new pedagogical methodologies but based on existing material. This existing material – identified during interviews with each partner- is the ‘student Artistic Notebook’ that is used in most of the partner-schools. It will be experimented and developed in various ways thanks to a videobased software called MemoRekall. Project partners will also provide feedbacks to the software developers, helping to adapt it to the needs of the Circus education sector.

COSMIC will start in September 2020 and will end in December 2022. It is lead by the European Federation of Professional Circus Schools (FEDEC) and includes 10 partners.

H2020 COESO project on Citizen Science accepted

The COESO project is lead by EHESS. It includes 15 partners, among them UPHF with a pilot project on dance. Among other contributions, I will be in charge of the development of new dance annotation features in MemoRekall.

Abstract of the project : The COESO (Collaborative Engagement on Societal Issues) project facilitates and supports participatory research in SSH, through a service-first approach. COESO supports ten Citizen Science pilots presenting a variety of disciplines, societal challenges and types of engagement with citizens in different European countries. COESO project will specifically support collaborative practices in Citizen Science by developing a Virtual Ecosystem for Research Activation (VERA), a platform envisioned as a « collaboratory” providing a set of tools to discover potential partners, to define and co-design the activities, to co-create new knowledge and solutions, and to deliver them to society. COESO will furthermore collaborate with research funding organizations to enhance financial support to Citizen Science projects in the SSH and explore the frontiers of innovation in SSH public engagement by achieving a complete mutual learning with the teams involved in the Pilots. Finally, “Cooperation analytics” will be designed to measure the quality of collaboration between researchers and citizens in VERA. Those analytics will be useful to the project teams themselves but they will also be a major contribution to funders, policy makers, research organizations and other stakeholders supporting Citizen Science policies. COESO’s overall objective is to overcome the obstacles that hinder the development of Citizen Science in the SSH. COESO will enable a dramatic growth of Citizen Science projects in these disciplines and will intensify the collaborations between SSH researchers and citizens to tackle together the many societal challenges European societies face today. VERA will be one of the core services offered by OPERAS Research Infrastructure to the scientific community.

DH2020 Culture Analytics Workshop: Network Studies of Culture

Following the 2019 workshop, which focused on the use of time series as a way to understand and visualize humanities data, the 2020 workshop is dedicated to how network exploration and analysis can be similarly used to understand and visualize data. The questions at the focus the workshop are: How can network visualisations provide a distant viewing of data? What are the different steps to build a network? How to read it?

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Appel à manuscrits pour la collection “Humanités numériques” : monographies et données ouvertes en SHS

Dans le cadre de la nouvelle collection “Humanités numériques” publiée aux Presses universitaires du Septentrion (PUS) en partenariat avec la Maison Européenne des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société (MESHS), nous lançons un premier appel à manuscrits en vue de la publication d’un ouvrage en 2021.

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DHnord2020 Conference. The Measurement of Images: Computational Approaches in the History and Theory of the Arts. CfP.

The DHnord colloquium brings together the digital humanities community every year at the Maison Européenne des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société in Lille. The theme chosen for 2020 considers computational approaches to images in the history and theory of the arts. This conference will bring together for the first time in France the leading specialists in artificial intelligence applied to the arts.

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