Conferences

 

Annual Conference of the American Library Association

2013 ALA Annual Conference

McCormick Place Convention Center
Chicago, Illinois
June 27-July 2, 2013

 

ACRL Arts/TLA Program

Transformations in Performing Arts Librarianship
Sunday, June 30, 3:00-4:00 pm
McCormick Place Convention Center, Room N427a

The study of the performing arts is being transformed by new methods and technologies, presenting challenges and opportunities to librarians. This session features two panelists, Doug Reside, Digital Curator for the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, and Susan Wiesner, 2011 Innovation Fellow for the Council of Learned Societies, who will discuss their own groundbreaking work and suggest ways that librarians can engage with new initiatives in the performing arts.

 

 

Joint Conference of the American Society for Theatre Research and Theatre Library Association

2013 ASTR/TLA Conference: The Post-Thematic Conference

The Fairmont Dallas Hotel
Dallas, Texas
November 7-10, 2013

 

TLA Plenary

The Big D: Big Data and the Performing Arts

The emergence of large digitized collections of humanities resources has made it possible to meaningfully address research questions that previously would have taken many lifetimes to answer. However, theater historians have undertaken relatively little of this kind of work.

Despite large datasets of digitized theater reviews, industry news, and production information [cast lists in Playbill Vault or Internet Broadway Database], theater scholars have by and large continued to do close readings of texts and events – and have not yet attempted what Franco Moretti has called distant reading: analyzing not one small set of texts, but an entire corpus of digitized data.

Some primary examples of large digitized datasets include the Google Books corpus leading to the Google N-Grams viewer, which allows researchers to trace the frequency of words and phrases over two centuries of printed text.

An MIT project is currently mining repositories of digitized sheet music to uncover patterns in chords and melodic motions over time. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and University of Toronto are tracking articles in historical newspapers published during the Influenza outbreak of 1918 in order "to understand how newspapers shaped public opinion and represented authoritative knowledge during this deadly Pandemic."

These projects employ methods similar to those developed for research in the sciences in order to expand our understanding of topics of primary interest to humanities scholars.

This field is ripe for exploration. Possible Plenary themes may include:

  • Thought experiments designed to provoke project proposals
  • Narratives describing completed or in-progress research
  • Analysis of the existing digitized corpus of possible interest to theater scholars
  • Critiques of the assumptions and methodologies of Big Data research in the arts and humanities
  • Applications of cultural data in instruction
  • Libraries' role in access, storage, and distribution

 

ATAP Working Session - Expanding Scholarship Through the American Theatre Archive Project

The American Theatre Archive Project is sponsoring a working session at the American Society for Theatre Research/Theatre Library Association conference at the Fairmont Dallas Hotel this coming November. TLA is a partner organization in the American Theatre Archive Project.

 

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Last updated: May 5, 2013