Language Documentation: A Reference Point for Theatre and Performance Archives?

Miguel Escobar Varela 1a and Nala H. Lee a

aDepartment of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore

Abstract

Digital documentation is increasingly important for theatre and performance studies. However, there are still relatively few digital theatre and performance archives and many of them are not yet equipped to realize the full potential of digital documentation; they have been slow to adopt standards for data reusability, findability and interoperability. A field that provides a competing example is language documentation, even though this comparison might not readily strike performance scholars as immediately apparent. While there are a number of important differences, this article suggests that some aspects of language documentation might be relevant to the documentation of performance. Language documentation is still an incipient field but it has a more stable set of tools at its disposal. This article was written as a collaboration between a language documentation practitioner and a theatre scholar. It is our contention that both performance and language documentation can borrow from each other's technical and conceptual toolkits, a possibility that has been largely ignored to date in both disciplines. We hypothesize the reasons behind this omission and offer some suggestions of how a conversation across these disciplines might begin, by focusing on a case study where a language documentation perspective improves the functionality of a theatre documentation project.

1 Introduction

Digital documentation is increasingly important for theatre and performance studies. Performance documentation includes a range of activities (from ethnography to audiovisual recordings), the outcome of which can be shared in a variety of ways (from books to museum exhibitions). Here, though, we are primarily concerned with digital documentation (regardless of format or approach) that is publicly shared in the form of online archives. The reason for this focus is that such archives have become increasingly popular and we believe that their impact on performance scholarship will become even more apparent in the future[i]. However, there are still relatively few archives and many of them are not yet equipped to realize the full potential of digital documentation; they have been slow to adopt standards for data reusability, findability and interoperability. In Table Error: Reference source not found, we summarize certain features of prominent online theatre archives, as displayed on their online portals. The list is not comprehensive but it includes theatre archives that have been mentioned in the ADHO (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations) conference and IFTR (International Federation for Theatre Research) Digital Humanities Working Group from 2015 to the present. There are inherent differences in the material contained in them, but we believe the questions we looked at don't presuppose a specific kind of material, and apply equally well to text-based as movement-based archival collections. The questions used to construct the table were:

1.Do the archives have guidelines for citation of individual objects?

2.Is there a policy for deposition?

3.Is content reusable?

4.What is the copyright license?

The information in Table Error: Reference source not found was obtained via a thorough examination of the archives' web portals. We did not contact the makers of these archives but rather utilized displayed information that was available to a regular user, as of July 2017. [ii] This information might not fully reflect the reality of the archives as conceived by their makers, but they represent the experience of the regular web visitor. For example, we noted that the metadata standards of many of the archives were "not clear". Even if the archives do utilize a standard in the backend, if this information is not directly communicated to users, this becomes a problem for the sustainability of the archives and defeats the purpose of implementing a standard (this point is further explained later in this article).

Comparison of online theatre and performance archives.

Name / Item-level Citation / Accepts Depositions / Enables Reusability / Copyright License / Metadata Standard / Access / Established
Digital Theatre Plus / No / No / No / Restricted / Not clear / Subscription(paid) / 2009
Cuban Theater Digital Archive (CTDA) / No / Yes / Not clear / Creative Commons / Not clear / Open / 2009
MIT Global Shakespeares / No / No / Videos are downloadable / Not clear / Not clear / Open / 2010
Digital Theatre Archive / No / No / No / Not clear / Not clear / Open / Not clear
Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive(A-S-I-A) / No / No / No / Restricted / Not clear / Subscription (free) / 2008
Glopad / No / No / Not clear / Not clear / GloPAD Performing Arts MetadataSchema / Open / 2002
CircusOZ / No / No / [l]To some extent. Has own API / [l]Mixed / Not clear / Open / 2010
Digital Dance Archives / Yes / No / No / [l]Mixed / Not clear / Open / Not clear

Although we believe that certain copyright licenses and metadata standards are more useful than others, the table does not aim to reflect our preferences but merely to show whether this basic information is displayed to the user. To give an example, let's consider the issue of reusability. In this context, we understand an item such as a video or textual transcript to be reusable when it can be used for another purpose by a user who downloads such content. We understand that this ideal reusability policy is untenable for most archives, but we think that stating clearly the bounds of reusability is a key piece of information that should be communicated to an archive's users.

We must also note that our criticism here is limited to the technical display of information in the archives. These are all exceptional projects which are widely used by theatre scholars and which are groundbreaking contributions to scholarship in their own fields. However, the table suggests that most of these archives have yet to implement best practices that will make them more useful and that will ensure their sustainability.

What is the reason for this limited application of best practices in the field of online theatre and performance archives? We hypothesize that one reason is performance scholars’ uneasy relationship to the documentation of ephemeral media (Phelan 1993; Taylor 2003). One must also acknowledge the relative newness of theatre and performance archives. Creating and maintaining digital archives still requires substantial financial investment, but the adoption of best practices does not necessarily require bigger budgets. If anything, the adoption of tested standards for sustainability ensures lower costs going forward, and greater future impact of current projects. In moving forward, we could derive inspiration from other disciplines.

An obvious place to look for such inspiration is literary studies, where digital archives have a longer history. However, literary archives provide an imperfect model. The tension between the object of study and its digital surrogates are very different in both fields. In literature, while a digital facsimile or transcript of a book might not capture certain physical traits of a book (such as weight and texture), a digital surrogate captures all words via standardized and relatively reproducible and incontrovertible procedures. With few exceptions, words are the main focus of literary scholars. In contrast, no performance document can claim to capture everything that a researcher might want to study (the audience, multiple vantage points, multiple iterations of a performance) via standardized, reproducible and incontrovertible methods. Therefore, the notion of documentation does not really apply in the same way as it does within literary scholarship. The visual arts and film also rely on relatively standard processes for documentation (with the exception of artworks which are closer to performance, such as performance art and site-specific cinema).

Another field that provides a model of documentation is that of linguistics, even though this comparison might not readily strike performance scholars as immediately fitting. Within linguistics, language documentation is a fast-emerging subfield. While there are a number of important differences, this article suggests that some aspects of language documentation might be relevant to the documentation of theatre and performance. Language documentation is still an incipient field but it has a more stable set of tools at its disposal (specialized software, journals and a wider range of repositories). This article was written as a collaboration between a language documentation practitioner and a theatre scholar. It is our contention that both performance and language documentation can borrow from each other's technical and conceptual toolkits, a possibility that has been largely ignored to date in both disciplines. We hypothesize the reasons behind this omission and offer some suggestions of how a conversation across these disciplines might begin, by focusing on a case study where a language documentation perspective can improve the functionality of a theatre documentation project. As part of this joint collaboration, an article in a language documentation journal will examine the reverse situation of the one we present here.

The lack of interaction between performance scholars and linguists has historical roots (Jackson 2004). The contested relationship of theatre and performance studies with literary studies has led to a valid suspicion of text-based research in theatre, but it has had the unfortunate effect of creating a lack of awareness of developments in fields such as language documentation. Here, we argue that adopting best practices from language documentation does not imply subscribing to a textual paradigm. A substantial part of language documentation is directed towards the documentation, annotation and preservation of oral practices through audiovisual records. We don't suggest that linguistic standards and formats should be blindly transposed to a performance context. However, a deeper understanding of the standards and histories of linguistic documentation can invigorate the practice of documentation in theatre and performance studies. Both language documentation and performance stand to gain from a nuanced conversation around the applicability of standards and best practices across disciplines. We begin with the assumption that language is important to theatre and performance scholars but it is not necessarily the only concern. If anything, theatre and performance scholars are increasingly interested in the non-linguistic aspects of performance.

This article is organized as follows:

1.A short history of documentation in language and performance.

2.A comparison of the features and practices of existing digital archives.

3.An evaluation of the Contemporary Wayang Archive in relation to concerns from both language documentation and performance studies.

4.A series of recommendations for the intersection between theatre and language archives.

2 History and issues of language documentation

In order to understand how certain aspects of language documentation might prove relevant to theatre, it is important to situate language documentation within a specific history and specific intellectual agenda. This will be compared to the history and agenda of theatre and performance studies in a subsequent section.

Linguists have a long history of documenting languages, if we understand documentation to be the collection of data from various languages. This was (and still is in some subfields) usually done with the end goal of analyzing these languages, in order to make theoretical contributions to the field of linguistics with regard to language structure. In the 90s, linguists began to recognize the threat posed by language endangerment.

Language documentation as a field in its own right sprung as a reaction towards language endangerment. Krauss (1992) predicted that as much as ninety percent of the world's languages may become "doomed" by the end of this century. Similarly, UNESCO (2003) stated that at least fifty percent of the world's languages were losing their speakers, and that by the end of the 21st century, about ninety percent of the languages may be replaced by dominant languages. More recent numbers show that the situation may be slightly less dire, with an average of three languages dying every three months (Campbell etal. 2013). Regardless, language death is highly consequential for reasons including the loss of cultural or ethnic identity, the loss of part of the sum of human knowledge, and the loss of languages themselves which compromises the linguists’ ability to understand the full range of what is possible in human language and cognition (Lee and VanWay 2016). With a better understanding of the magnitude of what is at stake, a good number of linguists are now in the race to document languages, in particular endangered and underdocumented languages.

The notion of documentation is still contested. For some, language documentation should not include description. Himmelmann (2006, 5) states that language documentation is "concerned with the methods, tools, and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language or one of its varieties". In the same vein, Woodbury (2003, 39) proposes that the primary project of language documentation is the "direct representation of naturally occurring discourse", while "description and analysis are contingent, emergent byproducts which grow alongside primary documentation but are always changeable and parasitic on it". To scholars who hold this view, any additional activities detract from the time and effort needed for collecting, representing and archiving. This approach differs from the view of others such as Rhodes etal. (2006) who state that description and analysis are crucial steps in accounting for how adequately a language is documented. Thus, for some, language documentation is also focused on the analysis of materials and the creation of products such as grammars. There is in some sense, never an end to the extent a language can be satisfactorily documented, and some steps in documenting a language such as transcription would necessarily depend on how certain elements of a language are analyzed. Unfinished and unfinishable projects are also well known in theatre studies. Regardless of approach, language documentation as a coherent field has emphasized methods of language data collection (both audio and video) (e.g. Margetts and Margetts 2012), its representation (through transcription and proper use of metadata), and its archiving (usually through digital means). While language documentation as a discipline focused on these areas only emerged in recent times, the field has experienced rapid growth, particularly with regard to technological best practices.

The best practices within language documentation target a range of goals from collection to representation to archiving. Austin (2014, 60-61) identities five types of language documentation activities, including (i) the recording "of media and text (including metadata) in context"; (ii) the transfer of data "to a data management environment", (iii) the adding of value by "transcription, translation, annotation and notation and linking of metadata to the recordings", (iv) the creation of "archival objects" and the assignment of access and usage rights, and (v) mobilization, which is the "creation, publication and distribution of outputs, in a range of formats for a range of different users and uses". While this is a non-exhaustive list, important considerations in language documentation include the following. First, that language material collected is of high-enough quality. Second, that the language and its metadata are represented in such a way that they are useful for a wide range of users. Third, that language material is properly archived into perpetuity. These are but some of the primary concerns of language documentation, other concerns include the ethics and genres of data collected (such as conversations, religious ceremonies, or storytelling).Best practices surrounding collection, representation and archiving are particularly well developed, and can be potentially applied in other fields for a methodical approach to documentation, especially if language is involved. However, these best practices are also useful for materials that may or may not be based in language, such as images and videos.

Language documentation offers projects from which theatre and performance scholars can derive inspiration: shared repositories and specialized conferences.

Examples of shared repositories include the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) and Kaipuleohone: The University of Hawai'i Digital Ethnographic Archive. In performance, to the best of our knowledge there are no shared repositories, since most archive makers are themselves the depositors. Digital theatre archives, like several digital literature archives are, as Price (2009) notes, more like special editions than proper archives. In a useful practice, language repositories enable the deposition of materials that have different copyright agreements and access criteria. However, establishing depositories with clear guidelines is only half the battle. Observing the relative dearth of depositions in 2004 within the well-funded EDLP (Endangered Languages Documentation Project), Thieberger decried: "if a funding body like the ELDP cannot get all of its grantees to deposit in an archive in a timely fashion (or at all), how can unfunded researchers be expected to make use of an archive?" (Thieberger 2004, 131). The situation has much improved since then and Thieberger's own PARADISEC is now a leader in the field of shared repositories and their easy and comprehensive guidelines should be basic reading for anyone setting up a digital archive in the humanities (PARADISEC 2016).

Copyright and access are important issues for the makers of theatre archives as well. As Borgman notes, in the humanities, researchers don't usually own their data (Borgman 2009, 2015). This is similar to language data that arguably belongs to the speakers more than to the linguists who collect them. Ethical concerns that come together with collecting, representing, and archiving data are as important to theatre as they are to language documentation.

Examples of conferences dedicated to language documentation include the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation and the Documentary Linguistics Asian Perspectives series. Examples of journals include Language Documentation and Conservation and Language Documentation and Description. These venues allow for an exchange of ideas regarding important conceptual issues, as well as practical considerations at different levels: what types of microphones to use, what metadata standards are recommended, etc. Certain conferences for theatre documentation have been organized in the past, most notably those by the Documenting Performance Working Group of Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) (TaPRA 2012). But more permanent forums need to be established for the field to move forward.