 Such an important initiative than with MENA theater makers whose work has been in its own way groundbreaking. I am delighted to be joined by two Golden Threads beloved advisory board members, Samaral Saber assistant professor of theater and performance studies at Stanford University without whom this collaboration wouldn't have been possible. And arts professor and director of the Lark Middle East US playwright exchange Catherine Coray and also a very warm welcome to playwright Adam Masayir whose courageous play Drowning in Cairo was read at our New Threads in 2018 and warm welcome to stage director Pironius of Sada who was just announced the next producing artistic director of the fine arts center theater company at Colorado College. I am so thrilled to be in your company. I would like now to pass it on to Samaral Saber to welcome and introduce our guest of honor today, Marjan Musawi. Samar. Hello, thank you so much Sahar. Today I have the great honor of introducing Dr. Marjan Musawi. She holds a PhD in theater and performance studies from the University of Toronto's center for drama, theater and performance studies where she trained in theory, craft of theater making dramaturgy and diasporic performance. She is the lecturer at Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, University of Maryland. Marjan has also served as a faculty member and designed curricula for the University of Toronto, York University, Portland State University and Parandazad University. Marjan is the author of several scholarly articles, books, chapters and interviews published in the drama review, New Theater Quarterly, Asian Theater Journal at Humanica and online journals. She is the principal investigator and curator of a prolific photo exhibition on Middle Eastern theater and the regional managing editor of the Iran section for the theater times.com. Recent collaborations include those with gatherings, IPCCR, Persian Digital Humanities and nowadays theater. You can learn more about her work at marjanmusawi.com. But today Dr. Musawi is here about a unique project that is the first of its kind on Middle Eastern theater. It is called the Digital Guide to Theater of the Middle East. In the next minute or so, I would like to tell you why this project is exceptional in its conception and scope. It began with a clear interest by the scholar to show evidence instead of only discussing it. Years ago, I received what appeared to be a random message from an emerging PhD at the University of Toronto asking me for images of performances in Palestine in the mid-20th century. I suggested a few and gave the bibliographic citations and we began to be in touch ever since. These photos were to become part of a large photo exhibition which she has grown into a meaningful platform that we are to look at and discuss today. What is most significant here is that marjan created a place for those artists and scholars who are committed to Middle Eastern theater. This is a project about creating infrastructure and foundation, one that is desperately needed for artists to promote their work and scholars to research and better understand the region. In a continuing race to digitize human experience across the globe, we have seen a proliferation of these platforms, the most known of course being Wikipedia but we've also seen aggregators and creators of content like HowlRound and TheaterTimes. A version of Marjan's model is the Hemispheric Institute created by Diana Taylor. It functioned as a resource for those of us who are interested in the theater of the Americas. For a long time, I had heard a complaint. Why don't we have a platform like the Hemispheric Institute for Middle Eastern theater? That was always a great question. Today in 2020, 2021, enter Dr. Marjan Musavi. It is a great honor to have introduced this colleague and someone who I am very proud to call a friend. I can't wait for this discussion. Please take it away, Dr. Musavi. Thank you so much. I mean, wow. And thank you so much for the kind introduction. I go directly to share my screen. Hello, everybody. Thanks for coming. Again, thank you, Sahar and Summer for this kind introduction and for joining me in launching this digital platform. I'm really honored to be here. As the endowed Roshan Lecturer for Persian Studies at University of Maryland and the founder and principal investigator of the Digital Guide to Theater of the Middle East to any first century volume, I welcome you all. I'm delighted to start this much anticipated launch with the happy news that my intellectual home, Roshan Institute for Persian Studies is now hosting DG2Me and committing its resources to intellectual, technical, and financial support for the project. For this rare opportunity, I'm indebted to Dr. Professor Fatemeh Keshavaz, Director of Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at UMD and also to Professor Matthew Miller, the Founding Director of Roshan Initiative in Persian Digital Humanities, Perstig, the pioneering project for constructing the digital infrastructure and promotion of Persian Digital Humanities research. At the time of my arrival, almost a year ago, Perstig at the University of Maryland Initiative housed two separate projects, the Persian Manuscript Initiative and the Open Islamic Text Initiative, both building digital resources for the study of the pre-modern Persian world. DG2Me has now been welcomed as the third major project to the fold. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the significant role of my colleagues at the Golden Thread Productions, Sahar, Asif, and Bindi for the idea of celebrating the launch of the website. My special thanks for today's launch. Also go to the Sohaib and Sara Posi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University, especially Dr. Samara Sabar and Colleen for sponsoring and co-hosting this event. Without their support and sponsorship, this project might not have taken off or at least been much slower. The reason I'm emphasizing these academic supports is that as many might know, universities acceptance of digital scholarship and projects is uneven, but the acceptance of DH projects like DG2Me by my host institute and APOC program at Stanford University is exemplary. And last but not least, a big thank you to my co-panelists today. I look forward to our discussion. Now let's see what DG2Me is and what it does. The Digital Guide to Theater of the Middle East 21st Century Volume, or what I call shortly DG2Me, provides essential information and the most significant plays or performances written and performed in the Middle Eastern and North African theaters and their diasporas since 2000. The goal is to recognize and display the breadth and diversity of theatrical visions, creations and collaborations of the meaner theater artists to the members of the world academia and theater community in an accessible and sustained form. In addition to increasing the visibility and inclusion of meaner theater in a scholarship and curricula and on a stage, DG2Me pursues three objectives. To make digital archiving of meaner theater more sustainable, accessible and searchable, to enhance the digital capacity of scholarship in the English language about meaner theater and to create a platform to connect with artists and experts in the region. The idea of the Digital Guide came to me after teaching the course Middle Eastern Theater and curating the first photo exhibition of Middle Eastern Theater at University of Toronto. The project of the website began with preparing the digital form via Google form. Each form, as you see, asks details of theatrical performances, including titles of the works and names of artists in two languages, the original language and English, their gender, dates of writing and staging of the plays, number of characters, production history, genre, major themes and significance and synopsis of the play. And this is an image of the Google form. It's a two-page Google form. Next, Adam Masayek, my dear colleague and assistant and I communicated with about 40 experts and artists based in and from the meaner region. I should acknowledge Samir's help as he said at this very first state. To my great surprise, 26 contributors from 12 countries and their diasporas volunteer to complete the Google forms. You can see their names on the contributor page on the website later on. And I'm so glad that some of them have joined us today from Iran, from Turkey. Yeah, I just don't see everybody, but I'm so glad I welcome them. So to this state, they have submitted 118 Google forms or entries from 11 countries and their diasporas. To select the works, we asked, and this is the image of the website that you will shortly see. To select the works, we asked the entry writers to give priority to plays with sociopolitical themes and to artists belonging to marginalized communities, including diasporic groups and underrepresented theater practices and productions. The database includes many remarkable plays featuring humor, tragedy, reflections of everyday life, the wide range of settings and three dimensional characters in a range of styles and genres. Experimental, historical, interactive, romance, political plays. What distinguishes this database is that the local contributors created and its data are verified by theater scholars who reside in the region or are in close contact with the contemporary theatrical scenes in the region. The core team consisting of the, core team of the project consists of the web developer, Hamid Razadeh Khan and my assistants, as I said, Adam, as Sayegh, Arjun Davan and Martin Yusef Zabarian. They have been painstakingly and voluntarily helping me with designing, uploading the content and dividing the website. The process that is ongoing. In terms of who can benefit from digital to me, it is intended for educators, students, researchers, theater practitioners, translators, the general public. Each group can benefit from different subsets of data about the place, text, context and production history. Most importantly, this resource is intended for those individuals who just cannot get enough of this field. As you will see shortly, for the time being, we have presented the data of 104 plays from nine countries in addition to the section of diaspora. We are adding more plays than countries as we go. For instance, I have recently received entries from Kuwait and Bahrain, but they're not here yet. The website is an open access, as you will see, and user-friendly and has a customized advanced search. You have the option to apply a number of filters. You can either search by the title of the play, name of the artist, or you can filter your search by country, year and genre. It also has a responsive design, can be used on different interfaces, cell phone or laptop. You might have noticed by looking at the form that I first shared with you, that the categories of information are different from the form. Here on the website, we're presenting the title of the play and name of the playwright in two languages. The year of writing and staging, major themes, synopsis and significance, country, production history, and some useful links, for instance, the YouTube links. In the next phases, those categories like number of casts, name of the director will be added. Speaking about other features of the website, technically the website has a search engine optimization to be compatible with Google SEO requirements. Its loading speed is optimized and multi-editors can work on it at the same time. Users can subscribe to our listserv and there will be a newsletter soon. In a nutshell, digital means is at its first phase. You could call it beta version, still updating, evolving, but ready to get developed. There are definitely a lot to do and a lot to cover. One of our challenges in addition to difficulty of accessing the archive and information has been the shortage of financial support and human resource. It is also important here to make visible human labor aspect of digital humanities projects. We keep receiving entries from the region, even now that we have stopped or we have actually limited our communication with the experts in the region. So there is definitely a need to expand our team. In addition, we acknowledge that information about the place is captured by particular people at particular places and times. We all know that data and algorithms are not neutral. We also acknowledge that digital tools and spaces require decisions about taxonomy and representation that are often challenged by creative works and the information we receive about them. We know that in the process of selection, curation, narrative, some extent of erasure might happen. It is inevitable. That's one of the biggest challenges for me and my team is how to present without being the voice of knowledge. I believe the backbones of every digital project are digital infrastructures and infrastructures of collaboration. In the field of Middle Eastern theater studies, there's often a division between digital work produced in the region and digital work that is about it but is done outside of the region. My vision is to create the bridge between these two works. So in addition to my first challenge about how to present this data without being the voice of knowledge, my other concern is how to invite users to engage in it and how to invite people to make connection themselves. Addressing these concerns allow us to construct the infrastructure of collaboration in the field of digital humanities. I now study about theater of the Middle Eastern region. Digital Me is a project that goes beyond universities and national boundaries. And what I value most is the infrastructure of collaboration that has been constructed through this project. It's a peer-generated repository and my hope is to create the digital network of collaborators and users who can connect and exchange works and ideas. That explains why I embarked on this journey. And as you know, other humanities fields have made the jump into the digital age by creating digital corpora, digital repositories, et cetera. The field of Middle Eastern theater studies needs to do these as well. What I hope we can do by conducting such projects is to facilitate the transition by creating digital infrastructure such as repositories of digital scripts, documents, images, digital archiving of oral history, digital mapping or story mapping and machine actionable corpora, et cetera. To give you an example of what we can learn from our data, even at this stage, some interesting findings transpire from the received data. For instance, out of the 118 entries that we have received, almost 80% of plays are original and 20% are adaptations. Or 24% of the corpus we have gathered are diasporic and 76 are created in the region. Another interesting finding is that half of these plays have their scripts available online which is so helpful if you want to include them in our curricula, for instance, for our company production. I acknowledge that a small example of the statistical population cannot be fully representative of the repertoire as a whole but in future, when we aggregate our database, we can certainly conduct a more precise statistical and computational analysis. Talking about future phases. In the future phases of aggregation, we will add more plays from our historical periods as well as those featuring wider thematic aspects. I plan to collect and digitize a large corpus of play scripts and prepare them for text mining and distant reading so that researchers can study different trends and ideas and find patterns that are not visible to us through conventional research methods. In addition to this objective, the future developmental phase of this digitization involves structured visualization of data and findings about aesthetic features, production history, cats, size, practitioners, originality, and gender of the artist and place and time of the performers. Another ongoing objective is cultivating the culture of doing and using digital humanities in our theater community and academia. I'm lucky that I have the support of Perstig at the Roshan Institute and today I'm very delighted that the project will receive this intellectual and financial support in the near future. But we need us to start asking questions about the scope of supporting digital humanities projects about the theater of MENA. We need to define more projects of DH if we think about revisioning, redefining, and revisiting our understanding. My strong belief is that we need to think about the state of digital scholarly research on in and from the Middle East and North Africa and we need to envision what will the next five to 10 years of digital research on the theater of the region looks like. Now, the exciting part. I invite you all to copy and paste this link to your browser and start navigating the website. I don't know if I can type it on the chat. DG2ME.com trying to find the chat. Someone already has Marjan. There is the link up there. Okay. Very good. Thank you. Yeah, and then thank you so much with that note. I finished my presentation and as I said, I very much look forward to have a discussion. Wow, Marjan, thank you so much. This is such a brilliant initiative. I would like actually, before we continue our event, I would just like to take a moment to welcome folks who are just joining us now and just a brief reminder, this is no summary, Golden Threads live stream series of conversations with artists who don't fit in a box and we're in conversation with Marjan Musawi about her great initiative, the digital guide to theater of the Middle East. Also with Samar Al-Sabir, Catherine Coray, Adam Al-Sahir, Piron Yusuf Zada, we will be sharing the biographies of the speakers in the chat shortly. I would like to invite you folks in the Zoom room with us today to utilize the chat function to post your comments and questions throughout the conversation. And those of you joining us over the live stream on HowlRound and Facebook, you may post your questions on Facebook live, on our Facebook page for artists to respond to. Thank you. I see the speakers. Where are you, Catherine? I don't see Catherine, here you are. Hello, everyone. Thank you. And please, guests in the room, feel free to show us your faces and join the conversation with love for this to be as friendly and informal as possible. Hi, Muna, hi, Sarah. I see many friends in the room and I know Marjan also mentioned collaborators in the room. Please come over, join us. This is a big celebration of Mina playwrights and Mina theater. From Iran. Yes. Maybe I guess from the... It's so wonderful to see everyone. Catherine, I want to start with you and I want to ask you, you especially because you've been building bridges, between the US and the Middle East and you've been creating all sorts of spaces for Mina plays to be born for a long time. We are all super grateful for your work. And especially like the highlight, what some of the work that stands out is your work with the LARC, Middle East US Playwright Exchange and Arab Voices. So I want to ask you, how do you envision you will be using the DG to me in the future? How do you think it will support the tremendous work that you're already doing? First of all, hi everybody. And hello to friends in Beirut, Giselle. I see you are here. That's so great. I guess I would start by saying that my first thought about making the most of this amazing project would be to introduce it at New York University at the Tisch School of the Arts. And especially to share it with particular colleagues who teach Arab theater and film such as Ted Zeiter and Naila Avatras who is one of the former heads of the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus now teaches for us at NYU very happily. And also to make it immediately available to all of our students and staff and faculty, we have actually a database that we are creating called the Archival Voices, which we are currently working very hard to diversify. And creating links between the two databases makes tremendous sense to me. Making the plays available to students at Tisch for academic study and also for performance possibilities. But what really excites me too is the idea, because this is really more the nature of my work as a producer and curator, is to create moments where the database can be brought to people live. And actually to create a situation where performances can be derived from the plays that are in the database. One possibility, for example, is to create connections between the work that Marjane has done in collecting these plays and the Middle East America Play Rights Lab at the LARC where it's a treasure trove of Middle Eastern American writers. And I know that they're going to be very excited about this initiative and this resource. And also, I immediately started to envision an event. An event to celebrate the database here on the East Coast. Why not? You're doing it out there. We could do something here in New York. And I just think it would be terribly exciting to invite Marjane into the room either in person or via Zoom to discuss the database, but also to engage the Middle Eastern American theater community here in New York and see what the additional possibilities might be. I think I have found it to be most effective to combine information opportunities with a chance to experience the work. Every event that I have put together, even if it's one where people are engaged in conversation for a couple of days at convening, it's punctuated with the work, the artistic work of the people involved. And I think that makes a big difference. So that's sort of where I'm at. I'm very excited to engage with you. This is also great. And we know that you make things happen. So I see these events happening very soon. Samar, do you want to take us forward? Do you want to? Yeah. Absolutely. So I was curious about how our artists who are on the panel are seeing this as a useful way to either promote their work or to find new work to engage with or new playwrights to engage with and how that might also bridge this work that could be happening in translation from the region as opposed to the work that happens here in the United States. So the short version of a question is, how is this useful to you as an artist? Perhaps Perrone and Adam could tell us about that. Thank you. That's such a great question. I mean, I've been friends and peers with Marjane for a long time. And when she first reached out to me mentioning the idea for this, I got so excited because I feel like in my own life, I juggle a couple of different things, which is being a playwright who immigrated to the US within the last three, four years and also being an academic student and aspiring scholar. And at the same time, also having been in curatorial and producing capacities. And in all three of these settings, I have found myself in conversations that, to say the least, are non-generative because I'm expected to represent a whole thing or a whole idea of who I should be. So for example, my play being the play that can be talking about a queer Egyptian experience or in curating a syllabus for a class that would be teaching, having there be one week where we can have one era play, often a historic play. And so I was so excited by this because just by the virtue of the existence of a guide like this, there's a resistance to the notion of a monolith or one thing existing being representative of all Arab theater or armed with Eastern theater or all Arab or Arab American theater. I also, as an immigrant, find myself in this liminal space where my lived experience and how I write is not necessarily going to be similar to someone who is still living in Egypt or in Lebanon. But I also don't really identify as Arab American, at least yet. And so the fact that it is curated and in the way that Marjan curated it leaves a room for that nuance and for a structure where nuance can really be embraced and beyond the categories felt very queer and very exciting. And I find that when I'm in a committee where we're discussing how to curate, how to put together a syllabus, or saying, oh, there just aren't enough plays from this or from that, I feel like I could pull this thing out and be like, well, actually no, here are 17 plays about this thing that you could consider. So it's not a question of a lack of availability. Adam said most of it, or all of it really, well. And so I second everything you said, and I am so excited to use this resource often and very fully for a lot of the reasons I think Adam mentioned, having now recently assumed a new role as a producing artistic director of an organization that is not specific. Thank you, Sahak, that is not specifically dedicated to mean-all work, I look at this challenge ahead very similarly to the way Adam does in terms of disrupting these monolithic ideas. And I found a rather disturbing trend in the white American theater that if stories of Middle Eastern, that the stories feel so unfamiliar, that the aesthetic has to be highly familiar, that there isn't room for as much aesthetic curiosity or experimentation, because there's already a sense that things feel far away from a predominantly white audience. And so it has, I think, also created a very reductive perception of what Mina writers write and the theatricality that ranges, I think, in a really beautiful and incredible way. And so I'm hopeful that in using this database, we can continue to disrupt those assumptions as well. And give Mina artists just as much room to play and experiment with their aesthetics, their styles, just as much as they are with their stories, as any white playwright would be able to do. So that feels really critically important to me. And the other component of it is the fact that this Fine Arts Center is situated on a college campus. There is an incredible, I'm already so eager and sort of chomping a bit to really dig into how a professional Fine Arts Center can more meaningfully interface, not only with the college's theater department, but all departments and create a kind of sense of civic engagement where the Fine Arts Center becomes a destination for students and not only for wealthy subscribers and patrons and donors. So the ability to use this database both as a way to consider programming choices for the Fine Arts Center, but to also offer it to my colleagues at the college as they're developing their syllabi, I think could yield some really exciting exchanges of ideas and collaborations and very selfishly directing projects for me. So I just think this is so incredible and to be perfectly honest, I want every American theater to know about this and to utilize it so that we never hear again, oh, well, we tried to program Amina Play, but there just wasn't anything in the pipeline. There wasn't anything that suited us because it's never been a pipeline issue. It has always been an issue of an opportunity gap and not an achievement gap. So I think this database does a really wonderful job of both dispelling those myths as well as creating a future of abundance that I think we can all embrace and enjoy. Well, thank you so much. I personally second every word you both said. And Pironi, I wanna share also when I first heard about the Digital Theater Guide, it was like two years ago, I think, Majan, when you emailed me, I was teaching theater at the American University of Beirut and also producing work at the theater initiative. And the email came and I was like, oh, great, I want this now. I was actually developing a syllabus for a Middle Eastern theater course. And I was like, can I contribute more than one play, perhaps? And Majan was like, of course. And I did and I contributed some of my favorite plays, Lebanese plays, one by Aliya Khalidi Ambara, Zoukhah Theater Company, I love their work. And as you say, the work that I contributed, for instance, by Zoukhah, that I put in there, these are works that are devised. These are not, of course, the text is there, but they are not text-based theater. They are theater-based on collective devising together. So the aesthetics is really varied and very rich. And there's so many things to follow up on from what you said, but I want to ask Majan about the question of language, because we know the Middle East is not one language, it's not necessarily English, and the platform is in English. The contributions are written, at least the entries are written in English. Some of the plays are not. How are you dealing with the question of language? How, for translators, for instance, you did mention this will be a great resource for translators and people interested in adaptations. But I'm curious to see how you envision this growing at the same time, keeping the diversity of the languages that we have. That's a very good question. Not the question that I have been actually thinking about since the inception of the project. For the time being, I decided to focus on English only because my target audience at this stage, I thought that would be North American or European academia and theater companies, theater communities. The Google form, of course, is in English. That was one of the limitations that I had to, if I wanted to, for the practical reasons, to aggregate data at this stage. The thing is that absolutely, I believe that the scripts must also be available for translation, and my hope is that in near future, I would be able to connect the theater company to the artist and then try to facilitate the translation of the script. This is something very ideal and what I have in mind. That's why that for now, I'm also focusing on living artists, those who are available. And I know that recognizing their voice and their art is so motivating for them to continue their work, especially those who are working in the region, despite all the difficulties and censorship and everything. So, yeah, Google form is in English, although I was notified by, interestingly, by one of the contributors from Syria that the Google form appeared in Arabic to them, which was very interesting. I thought, oh, okay, this is the possibility that Google, I think, is giving to the contributors. But I was lucky that I had Adam from the beginning with me who helped me with translating the Arabic. And I'm working with Persian. I also have good friends, Turkish friends who helped me with translation of the Turkish synopsis and information that we received. And overall, then we needed editors to edit the whole content, the texts that we received. So, yeah, this is, as I said, this is my hope that we can make accessible the script into why only English or Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Armenian, other languages that are in the Middle East, because how many languages are spoken there. And that's also only possible through further collaboration and help and contribution from the academia and also theater community. If I may, I have another question in regards to how the platform functions. What happens technically in terms of trying to figure out how the scripts get transferred? Meaning, will there be a point where you see the platform as a sharing platform either peer-to-peer or maybe through PDF that the script appears and you have a PDF of the actual script? And has there been any discussion about royalties and how that might operate? I know these are all complications and in phase one, you start working these things out, but I'm curious about what the team has thought about in that regard. Can I invite Adam as a playwright too? Because I know there is copyright and loyalty and you... Sure, I mean, I personally have all my independently of this project, all of my plays. And to the best of my understanding, a lot of like emerging playwrights plays in a North American context have their plays that are not published on New Play Exchange, which is very much also like a new play. I don't know how to best describe it. Platform where playwrights post their plays that are unpublished for other playwrights, for other artists, for other producers to engage with them. It is a subscription service for that website. And so with some of what, for example, with my play that I added to the website, I just put the link to the New Play Exchange. It is... I don't imagine a world where we would expect a playwright to, if it is a published play, where you would expect the playwright to have to put their play or PDF of it on this platform. But definitely, if a play is published or available for purchase online, including a link to it, I imagine is something that we would potentially do. I think this question obviously becomes more complicated because some of the plays were published in other countries and some of the plays were maybe published in the US and then there becomes a question of what are the rights and how do these rights translate around laws and so on. But I definitely do not imagine any context where a playwright would be asked with their play if they are not comfortable with that. I think for the most part, we've also set up a system so that playwrights or artists can be contacted for a quest of their play, which I know also a lot of on National Play Exchange that other platform, that's also a possibility for people to solicit plays and then have a playwright approve them having access to them. So I think that's how we've talked about it so far. Absolutely, thank you Adam for highlighting that. I believe that the least we could do at this stage is just connecting those who want the scripts to the artists and then they can start a negotiation over the loyalty and copyrights and the possibilities of staging their play. If I may ask Catherine, in terms of the voices project that you have, how would it be compared to this project in terms of doing different things and functioning in different ways from the end user perspective? Sorry, you're asking about the archive of voices? Yes. Well, the archive of voices was begun as a way of collecting plays, both historical and contemporary and making them available to the community and beyond. And a committee of people of which I'm the chair, she said happily, have been addressing the plays, the diversity or lack thereof of the place in the archive. And basically we were tasked with creating more diversity in the collection, both from a US perspective and also, and I believe this is why I was asked to be part of it from a global perspective, having worked in various parts of the world and knowing playwrights all over the place and having those connections and being able to draw from them. The hope is that our database will become extremely eclectic and we're working very hard on it. And similarly to what I said earlier about making it a living document, so to speak, and interactive, my hope would be that somehow because my passion lies in meaner work to actually create the connection between this database at NYU and the one Marjan has created and is on its way to becoming everything she wants it to be, to actually have, to find a way to bring it all together and make everybody aware of it so that, so for as an example, it's great that it exists, but how do we get the word out to make sure people know about it and know how to use it? And I feel that that takes a lot of effort and over time, many conversations and events and invitations and ways of creating, you know, connection between the efforts of other people and the wonderful efforts of Marjan and this particular database, the overlap between this and what people are trying to do from an informational perspective and from a performance perspective and a programming perspective, as I know, Perron will be deeply involved in doing and Sahar is involved in doing and Jamil in Chicago and Noor in New York City, we can find a way to come together and highlight, yeah, lift up what each other is doing. That's what is swirling in my head. How do we make something like that happen? Not just once, but over an extended period of time? Absolutely, I agree. I totally agree. Collaboration makes a successful future, you know, and we definitely need to join and boost each other's, you know, force. I totally agree. I would like to name that I think like the existence of an archive or a digital guide like this, so much of the conversation around it is about representation and about how we further, we further our representation for better representation and more representation in the field. And that question is so tethered to EDI goals and equity and diversity. I'm also really interested in thinking about the process by which we do that so that we are not engaging in the systems that have marginalized deaths. And I think creating a project like this is so much labor, just in terms of expertise, in terms of number of hours, and Marjahn has taken on so much of that labor. And a lot of the conversations that we have had have been about what it means for more people to be engaging in that labor and what compensation looks like and what it means for volunteer labor to exist. And so obviously like having resources and having continued something we've consistently talked about is being able to do this in a way that is sustainable and in a way that compensates everyone that is involved that is putting in their labor. And that fundamentally might mean that the project takes longer, but I feel strongly, and it is a growing project that won't take longer because it will continue to grow. But I feel really strongly that that is the only way to do it so that we're not continuing to engage in the system that has marginalized us in that way. Thank you, Adam. Yeah, I wanted to say it's here to grow. It's here to stay and to grow. I wanna just be mindful of our time. We have 10 minutes left and we have two questions in the chat from Leslie Kalarichian, playwright, actor in New York, asking, is there a plan to engage theaters in regions where Mina theater is not as common? How would they discover the database? And I wanna read also the second question from Sonali Pahua, forgive me if I'm mispronouncing your name. How can those of us teaching in academic theater departments help to spread the word about the database? And actually I'll put these together and ask you Marjan, what can each and every one of us here today do to help spread the word, grow the database? I know we have playwrights in the room. I'm inviting you, Giselle, I'm looking at you, Leslie, like go ahead, go to the website, contribute your work. What can we do, Marjan, to make this grow fast and spread fast? The best question that I'm asking, I'm really thinking about the ways to spread the word. That's why that I'm so honored and grateful for today's event. Of course, yeah, we need to spread the word. The project needs sponsors, need help. As Adam said, the question of compensation is so important for me. I've been thinking about it. We don't want to work on volunteer, you know, basically. Just spreading the word, please, and there is, on the website, you can find that there is a submission page and you could have access to the Google form. For those artists, experts, critics in the region and diaspora who want to fill out the form, I encourage them to do that. And then we collect them and we are parsing them and reading them, going through them, verifying them. And then finally uploading them. But as I said, this is my heartfelt wish. I really want to compensate whoever is competing in dreams, you know, and also the editors and those who are making me be uploading the content. So there's also a donation and as I said, my own host institute has accepted to help with that. But if we want to develop it faster, of course, we need more hands, more resources. You might need more resources. Yeah, this is what I can say. Yeah, the most practical way. Thank you. I think also I'd like to give the chance to our speakers and panelists today because you got a chance to look at the website, especially Catherine and Perron, because Adam was working on it throughout with Marjan. But Marjan shared the link with us. Today is the official launch. Today went public, I believe Marjan, right? But you had a chance to look at it. Do you have feedback to Marjan? Like, did you come across a bug, something that wasn't making sense for you on the website? I think Marjan would be happy to hear your feedback on it. Absolutely. I mean, it cannot be improved and developed without others' opinions and I really look forward to it. Even after that, I put my email here and I would definitely welcome all the opinions and helps with regard to better making the website more accessible, more user-friendly. Catherine. Just say that, yeah, I've been in touch with Marjan with a few ideas and one that stays with me because this is, again, it's a living document. It's going to take years before it becomes everything that you want it to be. I think that's part of the beauty of it. It is not a static thing. But one thing that is close to my heart is the distinction between work that is coming from the Middle East. It is written in other languages and is translated and is loved and appreciated. And Giselle can tell you I'm devoted to that project. But then there's also the Middle Eastern American playwright and who, I believe, needs to be lifted up and appreciated on their own terms. Telling stories that often touch on our countries of origin but are really about being Arab or Middle Eastern American in a very particular way. And I'm so proud, I would say, of the people I know who are writing about those experiences of being American and being Middle Eastern, having a foot in each world. And I think that there's something we said for making the distinction even in the database between writers whose plays are coming from the region and writers in the diaspora. It's just a thought, but it's something to consider. Absolutely. Thank you so much for highlighting that. And as an immigrant, of course, I value this. I'm myself an immigrant. So there is a section diaspora. And we are still, as you see, at the end of the list of those nine countries. And as I said, we are still working on make the distinction better. There are also some plays that have been produced in collaboration between two countries. So that's also something that we are working how to educate the website to show this collaboration. So yeah, highlighting the diasporic quality and origin and also highlighting these collaborations are on my agenda to do. And I appreciate that, Catherine. Thank you. Marjan, there's one more question in the chat. Would you include non-middle Eastern Americans who have lived in the US? Barbara, do you want to elaborate on your question? Yes. Yes, can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you perfectly. I mistyped. I meant not American. I meant Americans who have lived in the Middle East. That's a very good question. I mean, as far as it's about the experience of living and reflecting the life of living, why not? I mean, this is something that I definitely pay attention to this from now on. That would be interesting. Oh, great. Because it was a great influence on my life. I love it. So if it's a play about the Middle East, you think Marjan would also belong in the website on the platform? Yeah, it again goes to the question of how we are categorizing. Right. These are the questions that we need to address if we are. And absolutely, this is something that we need to work on it. Several of my friends, who most of us lived in Iran, but they have written books. But I don't think any of us have written plays. So interesting concept to explore. I agree. There was one question about translation of the plays, if there is any fund for translating the plays. Yeah, sorry, I missed that. Go ahead, Marjan, please. I know there are some funds for translating. And I have done translation of the plays, but for free. So if you can all find, I mean, this could go under the resources page. We try to find the resources, the grants, and fundings for translation. And then put it on the website for those who are interested and want to translate the plays. Yeah, thanks for asking that. Well, thank you so much, everyone. I think we're coming to the end. I want to just give a moment to Samer. If you want to say anything, and then I'll close. All I have to say is creating a platform is a very challenging project. And Marjan and the team have done something quite extraordinary here. It is much easier to live a life where we are constantly reflecting or constantly engaging than it is to create foundations for others to be uplifted, have their feet on our ground that we created for them. And that is the beauty of this project. And that's why it deserves our attention and deserves to be highlighted. So I'm really just thankful for Marjan's vision and for the team's work on this. And thank you, Samer, for moving this collaboration forward. Without you, as I said, it wouldn't have been possible. I want to thank Marjan once more for such a great initiative. And thank you to our panelists, Katherine Coray, Piran Yusuf Zada, Adam Al-Sahir. Thank you so much for such an enriching conversation and insights and all of you audiences in the room. I want to also thank Halround for hosting this session and especially Thea and Vijay for all their support throughout. I would like to thank our folks behind the scenes. Colin, Hommel at Abassi Program, and our very own Wendy Reyes and Chris Steele. This episode will actually live on Golden Threads and Halround websites. Briefly next at Golden Thread is a hybrid rendering of our play development annual series, New Threads, launching on August 3rd with a reading dedicated to Beirut and continuing on August 10th and 17th with new plays from three of our extraordinary resident playwrights and a new voice from New York, who's actually in the room today. Leslie Kalarychian, so happy that you're here. More on our website, goldenthread.org. Thank you everyone and see you next month in a new No Summary episode. Bye-bye.