Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access, and Entertainment

In this paper we present a project of creating a web based interactive encyclopedia of historical knowledge related to the history of the religions, the Bible and the history in general. The main source of information in the project is a film made by the Israel Museum that accompanies the exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls the oldest remaining copies of the Bible and extra Biblical documents. The film is describing the life of the members of the ancient community of Qumran that was behind the creation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In order to annotate the video we developed a data repository for creating and for linking various types of digital information to the video. Data stored in the repository is then used to develop tools for exploring the film and related annotations.

Linked Open Data (LOD) is a new way of sharing information about digital/physical resources allowing connected computers to better use information related with the resources. LOD allows to enrich information about resources possibly improving the user experience when using the resources or on finding them. This paper presents the experience in publishing as linked data the information which is present on ECLAP portal about multimedia content on performing arts. The system provides access to information about content, the terms of the taxonomy used to classify the content and also structural information like connections with groups managing the content, use in playlists and collections. Moreover information about annotations on audio/visual content is provided and also information about users is available (e.g., the ‘friends’ graph). The enrichments made on geographical information present in the content metadata (e.g., city/country of the performance) allowed to link content with the GeoNames database that is available as liked data.

The evolution of semantic technology and related impact on internet services and solutions, such as social media, mobile technologies, etc., have determined a strong evolution in digital content services. Traditional content based online services are leaving the space to a new generation of solutions. In this paper, the experience of one of those new generation digital content service is presented, namely ECLAP (European Collected Library of Artistic Performance, http://www.eclap.eu). It has been partially founded by the European Commission and includes/aggregates more than 35 international institutions. ECLAP provides services and tools for content management and user networking. They are based on a set of newly researched technologies and features in the area of semantic computing technologies capable of mining and establishing relationships among content elements, concepts and users. On this regard, ECLAP is a place in which these new solutions are made available for interested institutions.

This paper provides first a brief history of digital archiving and cataloguing cultural heritage in Italy and important achievements obtained by Prof. Eugenio Battisti and his team of the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in the last decades of ‘900. Then the author presents a comparison between available catalogue schemas provided by public and private institutions and the cataloguing needs of a particular cultural heritage like “spectacle”. A new prototype schema is proposed, which has already been used in a real project.

An overview of theatre sites and blogs in Italy.

1. The evolution of theatre information on the web, useful to identify some of the different tasks of a cultural website.

2. A map of Italian theatre blogs and websites, with a possible taxonomy, and the Rete Critica Award.

3. The first online list of theatre productions in Italy.

4. The project of an aggregator of theatre blogs and websites.

ICT projects dedicated to Cultural Heritage, in order to both democratise knowledge and act as an additional attraction towards audiences, should not neglect the communicative aspects. This approach can led towards two different perspectives: the creation of emotional and engaging events, and the creation of applications aiming at a more active participation of users in the development of the final product. The candidacy of the porticoes of Bologna as a UNESCO World Heritage Site will exploit the second solution to best involve citizens in the effort, offering, at the same time, training opportunities to students and young professionals.

During their lifecycle, digital resources, notably digital representation of artistic work, may often go through changes of custody, format migrations and other changes of their representation. This may pose a threat to the integrity of their intellectual content and makes it difficult to trace their provenance. The paper addresses the crucial problem of gathering and preserving the evidence that would allow, at a later time, to properly assess the authenticity, the provenance and the integrity of these resources. The solution that we propose is based on the definition of special XML structures to preserve the authenticity evidence, which are compliant with PREMIS Data Dictionary, a widely acknowledged standard in the digital preservation community, and hence guarantees a sound basis for the interoperability among different repositories.

The metadata framework which supports preservation, management and dissemination of the Sapienza Digital Library (SDL) resources, was built on the most spread digital libraries standards’ combination, endorsed by the Library of Congress. This article explores the applicability of the SDL metadata framework to the contemporary art field. It addresses the mapping of the SDL metadata semantics toward museums metadata standards, and analyses the information model’s differences, locating complexities in the specific field and technical difficulties in translation. The applicability study is useful to improve the SDL interoperability in the management of the differences in information granularity, and to fulfill the lack or to avoid the waste of information. It is also, the theoretical basement for the implementation of export functions toward resources’ aggregators like Europeana, focused also on cultural objects.

Currently, the Metadata Quality in Cultural Heritage Institutional Repositories (IR) is an open issue. In fact, sometimes the value of the metadata fields contains typos, are out of standards, or are totally missing affecting the possibility of searching, discovering and obtaining the digital resource described. Goal of this work is to support institutions to assess the quality of their repository defining a Quality Profile for their metadata schema (e.g. Dublin core) and identifying the Completeness, Accuracy and Consistency as High level metrics. These metrics are translated in a number of computable Low level metrics (formulas) and measurement criteria. The quality measurement process has been implemented exploiting the Grid based AXMEDIS infrastructure to rise up the OAI-PMH harvesting and metadata processing performance. The quality profile metrics and the prototype have been tested on three Open Access Institution Repositories of Italian universities and the evaluation results are presented.

The paper deals with the problem of validating digital documentation of cultural heritage. The trustworthiness of digital replicas of cultural objects relies on the presence of paradata, i.e. data concerning the provenance of the digital document. Several cases are considered, suggesting solutions to support the digital documentation, either born digital through automatic data acquisition or resulting from post-processing of captured data. Also interpretive digital models are considered and a tool for annotating digital objects is presented.

Large scale multimedia services such as social networks, content delivery networks, online service archives provide access to huge amount of content with several hundreds of descriptors fields associated with and file versions, thus really complex content management systems. They have a great need of and orchestrated workflow system and automated process management system that allow managing content and metadata, in order to automate as much as possible the activities (thus reducing the costs) and increasing the quality and accessibility. Grid computing technology may aid at integrating and improving existing content management and workflow systems in order to efficiently organize and manage large amount of data and processes to cope with them. In this context, the workflow model and architecture base on grid computing adopted by ECLAP network is presented.

In the context of an EU co-funded project, the authors have developed a semantically-enabled solution for 3D and stereoscopic film productions process monitoring. This paper describes the method selected to design and deliver a unified procedure to consistently set-up and test the acquisition prototype developed. The underlying idea is that at each development step it will be necessary to verify the improvement (or defects) introduced. Therefore, after the calibration steps, the repetition of a well codified testing procedure based on standard cinematographic practices and comprising most of the usual possible shooting issues was used to achieve comparable results thus improving quality control.

The Cuban Theater Digital Archive (http://cubantheater. org) is a unique digital collection of Cuban theater resources established by Dr. Lillian Manzor at the University of Miami. Working at the intersection of humanities and digital media, its purpose is threefold: it is a resource for teaching, learning, and research; a digital repository for important Cuban theatrical materials little known outside the island; and a forum to foster scholarly communication in this field. This paper presents a theoretical overview of CTDA’s design and development, its technical infrastructure, and its role in research, teaching and learning.

The on-line access to digital video allows for a new management of Performing Arts documents. The audiovisual document, conceived in the past by its creator as a complete work in itself now has to be flexible and open to suit the needs of its on-line users.

Information Retrieval’s activities for Performing Arts have to be improved by finding new tools and by developing a specific P. A. semantic.

We have to be aware that the abundance of available items on a given subject could transform an opportunity into a challenge.

A new pedagogy of abundance has to be reshaped, based on User-generated content, not losing track of the first original document, via an authenthicity assessment of the digital record. Original works - first created electronically now through digital technologies - have to be reconsidered as new content, not as old content on new platforms. From Antonin Artaud’s radio recordings of 1947 to portable Electronic Arts of the Seventies, ending with the Digital New Media of the new millenium, a new aesthetic and a new imaginary are rising, and it is strongly different from the old way of describing the world.

The Performing Arts studies are shifting from scarcity to abundance of digital data, witnessing the scarcity of available funds to preserve culture.

The more the digital archives will be open to new formats and free downloading, the more we will encourage the diffusion of European primary values and, in the same time, get a chance to preserve the millenary history of the Performing Arts.

Based on my digital reconstructions of two historical performances from Hungary, I am trying to investigate how these could form the basis of designing e-learning content for performing arts students, both for course room and self-study use. The reconstructions use rich audio-visual resources, arranged along a multi-dimensional mind-map, to facilitate understanding and to support further analysis. By presenting some earlier and contemporary attempts of performance reconstruction from Hungary I investigate how these could bring new approaches to theatre history writing. By looking at the relationship of narrative and image, I argue that a radically new approach is needed in how multimedia content is presented, if we wish digital tools to offer new experiences and alternative reading strategies of theatre history. I present several ways of using these materials for pedagogical aims, as different walkthroughs of the same mind map. What are the specific tools and steps that could bridge e-learning tools and live courseroom interaction? How could the presentation of bygone theatrical events give room to creativity and activate personal opinions and insights? Finally, I present a few very specific task types which can be implemented by teachers in these models, to raise and keep the interest of students of the visual generation in the performing arts of their parents’ times.

Integration of IT in performing arts education is often considered to be lagging behind in comparison with other educational fields. This might very well be somewhat of an exaggeration: as Koehler and Mishra (2008) point out the problem of integrating IT in educational settings is ubiquitous. The question this contribution tries to answer is whether on top of these general problems there are specific ones for IT within performing arts curricula that can be held accountable for the perceived arrear. In order to answer this question some main characteristics that determine the nature of the performing arts are briefly discussed: transitivity, collectivity of production and reception, multimediality and the principle of ostension. From these the particular difficulties for integrating IT in performing arts education are traced, mapping the (im)possibilities and pointing out some of the reasons for the relatively slow pace of IT integration. Having thus assessed the major problems and challenges the conclusion discusses the immediate and mid-term developments that would be welcomed by teachers and students in the field of the performing arts.

In this paper, we discuss the challenges that we have faced and the solutions we have identified so far in our currently on-going effort to design and develop a Dance Information System for archiving traditional dance, one of the most significant realms of intangible cultural heritage. Our approach is based on Description Logics and aims at representing dance moves in a way that is both machine readable and human understandable to support semantic search and movement analysis. For this purpose, we are inspired by similar efforts on other cultural heritage artifacts and propose to use an ontology on dance moves (DanceOWL) that is based on the Labanotation concepts. We are thus able to represent dance movement as a synthesis of structures and sequences at different levels of conceptual abstraction, which serve the needs of different potential users, e.g., dance analysts, cultural anthropologists. We explain the rationale of this methodology, taking into account the state of the art and comparing it with similar efforts that are also in progress, outlining the similarities and differences in our respective objectives and perspectives. Finally, we describe the status of our effort and discuss the steps we intend to take next as we proceed towards the original goal.

This paper describes the TKB project (A Transmedia Knowledge-Base for the performing arts), an international research project running in Portugal since 2009 at the New University of Lisbon. While focusing on the development of a digital note-book for video annotation in real-time, designated as Creation-Tool we will describe two original software applications developed in the framework of this project: a video annotator designed as a digital note-book for real time composition processes; and an archival platform towards an open and collaborative Knowledge-Base for the documentation of performing arts.

We will also explain the collaboration process between choreographers, linguists and software programmers during the iterative design and test phases of the annotation-tool.

By trying to converge methodologies from Cognitive Linguistics, New Media and performance studies, thus attempting to achieve a rich interdisciplinary dialogue, we show how video annotation practices, using both verbal language, and touch-pen drawings or customizable marks over the videos, contribute significantly to analytical processes of performing arts creations and to their documentation and transmission.

The intersection between the dancing body and digital technology produces new kinds of performative events that often exist only in the ‘now’ of event/user/audience interaction, resisting documenting and preserving in conventional ways, so are largely absent from our cultural heritage. As interlocutor, the artist is forever vital in the work existing and communicating, yet removed and absent in what remains; the living artist disappears into ‘data’. How do these digital corporeal embodiments then generate new kinds of artefacts? Are these ‘re-enactments’ more easily captured and preserved and if so, how do they disrupt what constitutes ‘cultural heritage’ and how we access and value our performing artists and their outputs? This presentation will explore these questions by drawing on the work of UK-based dance artist Ruth Gibson who uses motion capture technology to create visualisations of dancers for intermedial environments (exhibitions, installations and applications for mobile platforms). What does this work tell us about our relationship with the material and immaterial in performance, and our tools and methods for its preservation? I will argue that dance’s contribution to our cultural heritage is intangible yet fundamental for emphasising the vitality of the corporeal, expressive body in our performing arts cultural heritage.

We report on a prototype system helping actors on a stage to interact and perform with actors on other stages as if they were on the same stage. At each stage four 3D cameras tiled back to back for an almost 360 degree view, continuously record actors. The system processes the recorded data on-the-fly to discover actions by actors that it should react to, and it streams data about actors and their actions to remote stages where each actor is represented by a remote presence, a visualization of the actor. When the remote presences lag behind too much because of network and processing delays, the system applies various techniques to hide this, including switching rapidly to a pre-recorded video or animations of individual actors. The system amplifies actors’ actions by adding text and animations to the remote presences to better carry the meaning of actions across distance. The system currently scales across the Internet with good performance to three stages, and comprises in total 15 computers, 12 cameras, and several projectors.

We present LOLA (LOw LAtency audio visual streaming system), a system for distributed performing arts interaction over advanced packet networks. It is intended to operate on high performance networking infrastructures, and is based on low latency audio/video acquisition hardware and on the integration and optimization of audio/video data acquisition, presentation and transmission. The extremely low round trip delay of the transmitted data makes the system suitable for remote musical education, real time distributed musical performance and performing arts activities, but in general also for any human-human interactive distributed activity in which timing and responsiveness are critical factors for the quality of the interaction. The experimentation conducted so far with professional music performers and skilled music students, on geographical distances up to 3500 Km, demonstrated its effectiveness and suitability for distance musical interaction, even when professional players are involved and very ”tempo sensitive” classical baroque music repertoire is concerned.

This paper describes an algorithm employable in a game to automatically compose music tunes over a given chord progression. A key feature of our proposal is its efficiency in terms of computational power and resource occupation, which makes it usable in real time within mobile devices such as MP3 players and smart phones. Besides, music themes can be randomized, so that the cyclic repetition of the same chord sequence becomes the base for non-repetitive tunes, different as regards both their melodic contour and their rhythm. Furthermore, the complexity of the generated themes can be modified in real time by setting numeric parameters. A complete C++ implementation of the algorithm is provided.

The process of synchronizing multimodal data is used within numerous applications, including musical improvisation, interactive multimedia systems such as gaming, and exercise/sport tools. This project focuses on techniques to detect and match patterns and features from signals captured from different modalities, with particular interests in time-invariant approaches and digital warping for synchronization. Through applying feature detection algorithms and segment matching, the project aims to identify associated components within each signal for comparison with features from other associated signal streams, in order to provide feature matching. This has resulted in a framework that can be used to aid the development of a broad range of multimodal and data fusion systems. The paper also discusses a virtual conducting application as a test case that has been developed with the framework. The application alters the tempo of music playback according to physical conducting gestures.

Operatic performance has a long and well-established history as a large-scale performance encompassing elements of music, theatre and design. Staging of such productions is an intricate process involving many parties both on the stage and behind the scenes. This paper discusses multimodal and multimedia technologies and techniques that can assist this practice. We look particularly at the conductor, as the controller of temporal progression, leading the various components as a cohesive unit. For this reason, a particular focus is upon the development of methods to communicate cues and information for lighting, visual stimuli and haptic feedback. Previous work that has informed the design of this system is also discussed. The paper concludes with the project’s current status and impact.