Facilitators
Jonathan Bollen (Flinders University), Joanne Tompkins (University of Queensland), Gillian Arrighi (University of Newcastle), Jane Mullett (RMIT Univesrity), Shona Erskine (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University).
Abstract
This session brings together researchers leading innovations in performing arts eResearch through the AusStage network. Researchers will demonstrate new research applications for the AusStage database and raise questions about the implications of visual interface design and collective approaches to data curation for research in the performing arts.
Joanne Tompkins provides an overview of AusStage network and the research implications of new developments in eResearch for the performing arts. Jonathan Bollen discusses the development of a new mobile interface to solicit input from spectators and generate a new dataset of immediate, on-location, experience-near responses to Australian performing arts. Jane Mullett reports on collaborative eresearch with David Carlin into interactive online video archiving for performing arts companies. Gillian Arrighi provides a regional perspective on collaborative data curation from Newcastle, where researchers are using geographic mapping and visual exploration. Shona Erskine reports on user-experience research with dance artists in Western Australia and initiatives to improve the AusStage interface.
The session will conclude with guided discussion about the implications of these developments and applications for research in the performing arts and beyond.
About the facilitators
Jonathan Bollen is lecturer in Drama in the School of Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide. He plays a leading role in coordinating research for the AusStage database. He is co-author of Men at Play: Masculinities in Australian Theatre since the 1950s (with Adrian Kiernander and Bruce Parr, Rodopi 2008). His research on gender, sexuality and performance has been published in The Drama Review, Social Semiotics and Australasian Drama Studies.
Joanne Tompkins has taught Drama in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at UQ since 1996. She is currently Head of School. She researches spatial theory and theatre, as well as intercultural, multicultural, and post-colonial theatre. She is the author of Post Colonial Drama (with Helen Gilbert), Women’s Intercultural Performance (with Julie Holledge), and Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre. She has also produced Ortelia, a research tool to enable the analysis of theatre and gallery spaces through virtual reality.
Gillian Arrighi is a lecturer in Drama in the School of Drama, Fine Art and Music at the University of Newcastle and has been involved with the AusStage project since 2003. She has recently published on amusement parks as sites of performance in Veronica Kelly and Robert Dixon, eds., Impact of the Modern: everyday modernities in Australia 1890-1960 (Sydney: SUP, 2008); on animals in performance in Theatre Journal (Dec 2008); and on circus entertainments during the depression of the 1890s in Australasian Drama Studies (Apr 2009).
Jane Mullett, Research Fellow at RMIT University, has not only worked in the circus as a trapeze artist, but completed her doctorate on the evolution of contemporary circus. Her research work focuses on issues related to the circus industry including: quantitative research on the size and economic structure of the Australian circus industry, circus training, and the evolution of Australia's contemporary circus companies. She is currently working with Circus Oz on two research projects, and holds supporting roles at the Flying Fruit Fly Circus and the Australian Circus and Physical Theatre Association.
Shona Erskine graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts School of Dance with a Bachelor of Dance in 1994. She went on to gain a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours) Psychology at Deakin University in 2000, and a MPsych/PhD (Industrial/Organisational Psychology) from the University of Melbourne in 2007. Her PhD comprised a case study of an effective contemporary dance education program and its participating youth. Shona has taught dance at Deakin University, the Victorian College of the Arts and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.