The digital archive as storyteller

Abstract

Theatre in South Africa is deeply entrenched in the art of storytelling. We live, speak and move our stories in our embodied performance practices. While performance and its development are by their nature ephemeral, how can they be captured as data? And how can the data develop digital outputs that eventually tell their own stories? This paper will outline the way in which the rehearsal process of Antigone (not quite/quiet), the first of three practice-based research productions of the ReTAGS project, was documented and curated into an online repository. As data stewards, we will share the journey undertaken to migrate the ephemeral process of theatre devising into interactive and searchable data on UCT’s digital collections platform, Ibali. We chronicle the processes and jobs undertaken to capture, catalogue, document, enhance, curate and showcase the material. We explore how an online repository can be constructed not only in order to share the multiple stories present in the rehearsal process, but to encourage further engagements to advance a rigorous living archive. Through this we aim to give precedence to the way artist-researchers can use performance-based methods as reputable means by which to produce data, in order to drive academic research.

Keywords:

• African digital storytelling
• digital archives
• open repositories
• South African theatre
• performance studies
• data stewardship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The ReTAGS digital archive may be accessed https://ibali.uct.ac.za/s/RETAGS.

2 A workflow is a series of activities, organized in a particular order, needed to be done to complete a task. A rehearsal process can be described as being a workflow.

3 Machines can capture physical material (books, newspapers, etc) as digital images by scanning. Optical Character Recognition translates that image into editable text that can be processed by computer software and manipulated by humans.

4 This third section was filmed and edited by Kirsti Cumming and appeared in digital form on three flat-screen televisions in the performance.

5 This is the first of the four principles of FAIR data practice. The principles ensure the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability of data.

6 In this instance it was the transformation of raw digital objects as the material captured was born digital (i.e., captured on digital media). In other curation projects, it might also require the process of digitizing from analog to digital (i.e., from paper based or film-based media into digital files).

7 The goal of FAIR is to make it easier to re-use data. You can read more about FAIR in Wilkinson et al. (2016).

8 Founded by Roy Rosenzweig in the United States in 1994, the centre supports initiatives in the digital humanities developing projects ranging from open source software to exhibiting and creating sites. More information can be found on https://rrchnm.org/

9 In a relational database information sits in a series of tables, with column headings describing the topic information stored across each row. The structure allows for correlations or connections to be built across the tables so that new tables can be created.

10 For a succinct intro to databases please see N Katherine Hayles article “Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts” (2007). For a broader introduction relevant to humanists consider Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001).

11 There are a number of different tools that use a relational database as their architecture in setting up an online archive, contentDM, DSpace, Islandora, to name a few.

12 The Omeka S platform at UCT was renamed as Ibali, a word of the amaXhosa people for 'story' which is meant to drive the site’s objective to present stories through media and digital objects.

13 Dublin Core is a set of distinct properties used to catalogue resources on the internet in a structured manner. See https://dublincore.org/.

14 Schema.org is a community driven platform which aims to structure any data online. See https://schema.org/.

15 The authors have shared the work on the creation of the archive through several public presentations, the recordings of which may be accessed in the below links for further clarification: https://ibali.uct.ac.za/s/RETAGS/item/3125 and https://ibali.uct.ac.za/s/RETAGS/item/3123.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation [grant # 1804-05734].