 All right. Well, welcome to another episode of the ADHC talks, which is a podcast where we interview digital humanities scholars about their work and their projects. I'm Sarah Whitver and I'm the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Alabama Libraries, and today I'm joined by Rebecca Salser, who is Associate Professor of Dance and the Director of the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative at the University of Alabama, which is an intermediate, Rebecca is an intermediate dance artist and educator, and she creates dance films and co-directs the Dancing Digital No Boundaries Archive Project, which is supported by the National Endowment for Humanities. So welcome, Rebecca. I am I am deeply intimate with your project. I love your project and I can't wait to share it with some other folks through this talk. So my first question is, can you tell me a little bit about your research? And what I'm particularly interested in is, when speaking of research, what makes you feel nerdy and excited? That's always my most favorite part of the conversation. Well, thanks so much, Sarah, for having me on the podcast and thanks also for your involvement with and advice on the Dancing Digital Project. You're really an integral part of it and I'm grateful for that. So I wanted to be sure to say that. I don't know if this qualifies as nerdy, but what gets me excited is dance and the body and what what the body can teach us about ourselves in the world, what kinds of knowledge are stored in the body. And then on a secondary level, because I work with dance film and and now dance archiving, how in this in this new new-ish time we're in, when we go to screens to find knowledge, we go to screens to experience art a lot of the time, what are the ways that embodied practice can be transmitted successfully by screens. There's some paradox to it for me, because when I started making dance films, one of the things that really entranced me about it was that a certain amount of intimacy is more possible when you are recording in some cases. I mean, you can get up close to a live dance performance too, but a lot of us experience dance performance distanced and there are ways that the paradox is that you're no longer sharing space and time necessarily with the performer, but you can feel more included and closer to what's happening. And so that's been a real interest of mine in terms of making dance films. And now with this digital humanities component of what I'm doing, that kind of grows out of that desire to share dance art and to share it in ways that people are accessing it now. Yeah, I love the through line of what is going on with your project, because it starts with this deeply artistic performance based mode and it moves through formats and it sort of transcends, I guess, categorization in a way all the way through to you know what we're going to be talking more about linked open data and metadata in a little while, but the fact that it takes this intimate performance based art form and moves all the way through into a highly computational project is deeply satisfying for me. So tell me about your history with digital humanities and sort of how you arrived at this project. I think you've sort of foreshadowed that a little bit, but how did you arrive at doing a digital humanities project? I know that you have a collaborator for the No Boundaries Archive. Yeah, Giselle Mason. And sort of what were those conversations like early when you started that project and that collaboration and how did it get to where it's at now? Yeah, so I, before I became an academic, I was an independent choreographer and performer and I came to academia pretty late in life and I started making dance films while I was performing and making work in San Francisco. So I was already a filmmaker when I joined academia. And then when I got my first teaching jobs, they were not in urban centers. I had been living and making work in urban parts of the world where it's really easy to see performance. And that wasn't true of the locations I found myself in once I started teaching. So what became really clear to me quickly was how little access we all have to dance recordings, especially high quality recordings and full length recordings. If you do a lot of searching, you know, you can see a lot of dance, but oftentimes what you're seeing is, you know, a minute and a half of a 20 minute piece. There are a lot of reasons for that that I've spent a lot of years thinking about. But it's still true, even post pandemic, even with a lot of new digital projects coming online, which is all good and positive and wonderful. It's still really hard to access high quality, full length recordings of things that I want to teach. So that was kind of my entry point. And as I learned about the challenges and some of the reasons why, you know, for 30 plus years, since the advent of video, there's been, you know, more of a push to have the access component and dance keep up with the technology. And it's, it hasn't. It hasn't for a lot of reasons. But one of the biggest ones is intellectual property and dances. Dance can often be very collaborative with, you know, designers of costumes, lights, sets, composer, stage manager, dramaturge. There are a lot of people that can contribute to a dance piece that all hold rights to the piece. Choreographer obviously is somebody who holds rights. And so that makes it hard to disseminate work, and especially hard to disseminate work that was made before the internet was a thing. A lot of the contracts that people signed when they gave their work, for example, when they gave their old beta tapes to the New York Public Library did not include sharing on the level that we look for now. So it's hard when recordings exist, it's hard to access them. I've kind of gotten off my train of thought here. Anyway, so I was mostly concerned with sharing full length video and how to get that into the hands of audiences, but also educators and scholars. If you imagine trying to teach choreography or if you imagine trying to teach painting, where in a situation where you can only show like the bottom corner of the painting you're trying to teach, like that's an analogy for what it's like to try to teach form in dance when you can just see excerpts and snippets. And I started off just reaching out to people who especially were connected with the Dance Heritage Coalition. They have spearheaded a lot of dance preservation and access projects and then the former director of that organization, Libby Schmigel, is now the archivist and librarian for Dance for the Library of Congress. And she had led a lot of this sort of, she had led one really important previous effort to think about how to share recordings in a secure way that couldn't just be copied and disseminated. And also she did a lot of work trying to call some of those VHS tapes that were under choreographers' beds and help digitize things and pull things into a format that could be shared. She's been really helpful and a great mentor and friend and cheerleader. And also Sally Ann Kriegsman who was the director of the Dance Area for the NEA for several years and ran Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival for a little bit. She was the executive director there and also was, I think she was the president of the Dance Heritage Coalition as well. They've both been really helpful in telling me, you know, this is what's been tried before, this is what's worked before, this is what we can build on. So the first, this is going to be a long answer, Sarah. It already has a long answer. The first thing that I was able to do is pull a lot of experts together onto the University of Alabama campus to spend three days kind of discussing what's happened, what can we build on, what's needed now. And that was really great. That was in 2019. And that group of 19 scholars, educators, notation specialists, legal specialists kind of ended up pointing towards we need to try to build something in a different way. Like there are things that exist now that serve as models and stepping stones that are important, but they're fundamentally built in a way that doesn't feel sustainable enough for us, doesn't feel like it can encompass some of the needs that we have right now. So let's build something new. So that's kind of where that group landed after three days of discussions. And then the question was what does this need to be? What does this new thing need to be? Some of our priorities were a resource that shows full length videos of dance, a resource that can be more than one freestanding proprietary thing, but can connect outward. That was really, really important. In part because contemporary dance, especially modern and contemporary dance, have tended to like dance companies are often named after the choreographer. And so that person's work kind of ends up in an archive sometimes. There are a lot of archives that are named for the choreographer that don't talk to each other. And there are a lot of connections between choreographers, but it's when everything is built on a different platform and everybody is underfunded and scrounging just to get the thing out into the world, it's hard to get to that next place where you can look across the internet and find resources. So those were a couple of the priorities. We also wanted to find material that represented BIPOC and women artists specifically because those artists are less represented online than men and European, men of European background for sure. So we kind of started to brainstorm and look and think and Sally Ann, who I mentioned earlier, knew Giselle Mason and knew her work and connected me to Giselle. And after several conversations and one presentation on a panel together, it started to occur to us that we had pretty symbiotic projects. So, you know, mine was dancing digital kind of like a group of experts and specialists looking for material. And Giselle was and is a 20 year performance project that she did commissioning and performing solo work by African American contemporary choreographers that she had really comprehensively documented in beautiful ways. She documented rehearsals. She documented performances. She documented interviews with the with the choreographers. She had kind of b-roll footage of her in the garden of a choreographer or on a subway going to rehearsal. She had all the performances documented. I think I might have said that already, but she she had been thinking archivally really early in the process in a really beautiful way. And she also had and I'm just another thing that made me really fall in love with her project, which is called No Boundaries. It's called No Boundaries colon, Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers was the extended time period. You know, she's learned she and her younger body are learning work in the early 2000s and then performing the same like going back to check in and rehearse with the choreographers over the years and performing again the same work in 2018. And it I felt like the collection really showed a lot like leaned into the strengths that digital collections can surface. So we began to collaborate in I think it was January of 2020 right before the pandemic. We met in New York right before the pandemic and but we realized that she had the perfect kind of seed for not only beautiful content but something that could become an outgrowth of more content. So then we were able to get funding from the NEH to build her a digital archive for the No Boundaries project. And then there's another chapter. Should I stop for a minute and take a breath or should I just go right to this next chapter? Well, I mean, I think the next thing we're going to do is talk about your current project. Oh, okay. So, you know, as far as you want to go and then we will start talking about your current project, which is very exciting to me. It's all very exciting to me. I can't express I sound like I'm just, you know, spouting hyperbole about my excitement, but I'm your project thrills me in so many ways. You go as long as you want. As far as that goes, I think, you know, as you're talking through this, I really, you know, I love what you did with your symposium. And like, I think if we have a moment to sort of revisit what happened there, you said it was 19 scholars. I believe that you had, did you have a little bit of grant funding for that? Yeah, we did. We had a planning grant from the NEH for that. And how did you select people to come? And what were those conversations like? How did you sort of plan that out? You've talked a little bit about the outcome with, you know, some values in place and sort of a project more defined and more scoped. But, you know, you put that together, how did you choose to, did your mentors help you select people to invite? Yes, my mentors were fabulous connectors, both of them. They both know everybody and because they've been working, working towards better access, they kind of know what's new and coming and they work great connectors. I also spent a few years before the symposium proposing panels at conferences and speaking at conferences, you know, doing presentations. And so those those conference moments allowed me to also create a network that I could draw and to pull these people together. Yeah, so it really was people from, most of the people were from the US. We had Eugenia Kim from Hong Kong was here, but she was the only non-US person. And a lot of them had a connection to an existing digital project or a previous one. There are several really beautiful digital dance projects that have become obsolete because the software has been retired or the, you know, like something that runs on Flash Player, for example, or just it's hard to find the continuous funding to sort of feed these projects. One of the people I met, Sybil Husky, from a university of North Carolina, she had a project called a video collaboratory and she was part of the advisory committee and came to that symposium. She said, she said, Rebecca, you're having a baby who's never going to grow up. And that's just really stuck with me because it's kind of, it's proven to be true in so many ways. Yeah. You know, like you're going to build a thing, but then the thing is going to need care and it's going to need feeding always as long as it's going to exist. It's always going to need that. When you stop doing that, it will go away and not be accessible again. So that was an important revelation for me. Yeah. I'm interested in some of these conversations because I often am working with folks who are at the very beginning of their careers and perhaps even graduate students and the notion of this network building and this collaboration, the spirit of collaboration, I think is very, you know, it can be very intimidating and people don't know where to start with it. And I think, you know, being able to talk to someone who has taken advantage of mentorship and has built a strong network of peers and colleagues to lean on as you're working through a project like this and having people tell you things like, you know, sustainability and preservation are big question marks when you go into a digital project and there are things that you probably should think about, you know, at the beginning and not at the end because if you spend 10 years building something, some of the technology might be obsolete by the time you're finished building it and then that's 10 years of your life. Yeah. You know, there are some really beautiful digital archives that have been in dance that have been built on a shoestring because, you know, dance is perennially underfunded. One of them is built on FileMaker Pro. Oh, yes. One of them is built with Salesforce. And just because the people doing these, you know, heroic acts of preservation, that's what is available to them. That's what, you know, a board member has access to Salesforce, for example, and can give you that for free. But it's not, it does not set you up to connect to anybody else. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just, I'm underlining what you just said in terms of how, you know, thinking about the longevity of what you're building on and what its possibilities might be long term is really important. Yeah. There was a special issue several issues ago in digital humanities quarterly where scholars were discussing minimal computing and I found it so very eye-opening. They challenged, I think the editors of the special issue challenged us as practitioners to consider the possibility that our project could be carried somewhere that doesn't have internet and accessed on a flash drive. Like, what does that look like? And how do you build that out? And how do you take advantage of some of the very sophisticated technologies that allow for these very complicated projects, but also think about like how minimal access could happen with our projects and also as a measure of preservation. What are the archival standards for file preservation so that if the project that we've built out disintegrates through attrition, we still have the original raw files of data that we could build out another project for. So things like metadata and WAV files and TIFFs and JPEGs, like making sure that we have access to the archival standards so that the data is preserved even when the project dies. And that's, I think, a very interesting sort of spectrum to think about when you're, when you're building a project out because your heart is going into this, like, you think about that final polished project, but really, all of the labor is going into collecting and organizing and preserving the data. Sometimes people forget about the preservation portion of it. Yeah. And now I'm going to step into an area I don't know enough to talk about intelligent things, so please consider this thoroughly rough draft, but you know, in terms of video and sharing video, there is the TIFF format and, you know, universal viewers as an opportunity, like there are some opportunities for ways to be creative about who's holding the actual files and the ramifications of that. If that makes sense. I can't say much more and be intelligent about it, but just... Yeah. Where do you deposit your data files? Do you put them into an archive, you know, into an archive, or do you put them into an institutional repository? Do you want them to be democratically accessible? Is it who has the rights to them? If they have super, you know, clear rights and it's not open access or creative comments, content, what is the best place to put it so that it's being preserved and continually maintained? Yeah. With this project with Dazelle, we're very lucky that she's at UT Austin and they have the ransom center there who has agreed to serve as the archive of record for her collection, so they have the archival grade and size recordings, but the digital archive we're building has lower resolution, smaller, easier to stream versions of the video. Yeah. So that was... I mean, and while we're talking about, let me try to finish that sentence, that is a privilege. That is a privilege that we as tenured faculty in big public institutions have access to that most artists and collection holders and arts organizations do not have. So that's been very present for us thinking through what we make and how it can help other people. Yeah. I have heard stories of people saving it on single hard drive, like external hard drives, and I've heard stories of saving them on hard drives on desktops and then the desktop ages out and it's difficult to get that or the person who has the external drive passes away or becomes not accessible and then that data sort of passes into a place where nobody can get to it until perhaps it is found and then even then is it in a format that can still be accessed and there's so many, there's so many little considerations that I know are overwhelming to think about as you're moving through a project like this and you're right, the privilege of having places to store materials and have them preserved and cared for, right? It's not even just stored but if you are able to place it into an archive that has policies about digital content then you have caretakers and that's really incredible. Yeah. Yeah, it has been. I should probably tell you about what we're doing. So the grant that we got from the NEH was to build a digital archive for this collection of multiple performances and rehearsals of these 10 solos and which is you know a pretty, it's pretty self-contained little logical collection which is lovely. At the same time, we're trying to build it in such a way that it can be generalized and shared as a template for other artists. Yeah, it's had sort of a split brain as we've been thinking about what kinds of fields are necessary, what kind of information we want to capture. We are finishing that end of this year, December 31st. That is when it's going to be done and ready. We're going to share it with the world. So we're definitely in the kind of push to get that up and running. We have been trying really hard to both Giselle and I are dancers and dance makers and we have been trying to allow that methodology and knowledge and ethics to lead the project to lead what we build. And that's interesting and challenging. So an example of that is it's just punishingly hard to tag videos where it's just movement and maybe the choreographer is giving information just by making sounds. Like it's not so much a it's more of a something like that and you're like, okay, great. How do I translate that into a word that allows somebody to find that? Right. So that's not a new problem that we've discovered, but it's something that we're trying to figure out how we want to negotiate. And one of the ways that we're trying to do that is to create features that allow the user to compose themselves. So you, you know, hopefully if all goes according to plan, this is what is being made now and so far so good. You will be able to see a video and clip, create a clip for yourself, annotate that clip and either put it in a playlist that you can save and come back to. So if you're teaching from this collection, you can have a playlist that you can show the class without having to go back in and scrub through each video and find each section. You can also take those clips and compare them side by side on the screen. Maybe you want to see BV Miller performing her work Rain in, I'm guessing it's like 1984 or something when it's made. I could be wrong about the exact date. And then you want to see Giselle Mason performing the same thing in 2018 side by side. You can play the same moment of the same dance and see or you could see Giselle performing it in 03 and then performing it again in 18 and see what's evolved, how she's changed, how her interpretation has changed. So those are a couple of ways that we want to allow the viewer to choreograph the material. Yeah. Essentially, we also hope you can find things with, you know, searching and tags and all of that. But yeah. Yeah, so that's that's what we're doing right now. It reminds me of the kind of work that linguists do when they're trying to like annotate and take notation of a new language that is not a written language and how to express sort of the sounds. It's been it's been a little while since I've, you know, refreshed myself with linguistic terminology, but, you know, you make a phonetic sound with your mouth, and there's a way to phonetically write that out. But then it also has so much freighted meaning with it, right? And you're trying to not only capture the phonetic communication that is happening. Yeah. But also like all of the the connotation and the denotation that is happening with those very simple sounds that allow a dancer to make a movement or alter an asset, right? Yeah. I mean, what you're what you're saying connects to the just really wicked problem of dance notation. Yeah. You know, there are some wonderful dance notation forms and some people who are very good at notating and translating reading scores. But a lot of us don't know how to do that because it's tricky enough that it's not taught in a dance studio, for example, if you're going to attend a dance studio. I mean, a lot of universities teach it. But, you know, if you think about music and how many variables are recorded in a music score, I'm not quite sure how many, but I'm thinking, you know, pitch, time, dynamics, instrumentation, loudness, I don't know, I've reached the end of my knowledge there. Yeah. But think about dance and, you know, you have a whole lot of joints and you need to notate down to this one, because it's really different to do, you know, this than it is to do this and then that is that needs to be notated in in time, in space, in relation to other bodies in space. Right. And it's it's a big job. So yeah, yeah, it's it's one of the reasons why video is so important in dance and sharing video and creating access to video is so important in dance. Video isn't notation of dance. But it is. It's a very useful record. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the wiki based project, because I, I'm excited to hear how this is translating into metadata that is universal enough, the establishment of an ontology or a vocabulary that is flexible enough to apply to multiple projects with this, you know, ethic or this ethos of of dance and choreography as the forefront that you guys are building. So how is that going? Yeah. So we're at the beginning of that chapter of what we're doing. And I have to say that kind of hard kind of reaching back to what you were saying about starting with the embodied and getting to data, like, I would never have imagined this is where I would be working. And this is what I would be thinking about like this is exciting. And the learning curve is steep. And that makes it kind of fun and exciting. But also, I think it's just really improbable that I'm deeply in this sort of library science and information science world now. But so what, so we knew that what we wanted to build, we wanted it to be more than just a free standing proprietary website that didn't that didn't connect out. And so we started to look at linked data as a way to connect out to other resources. But we also honestly started to look at linked data as a way to reduce our labor. And thinking about if we if we create something that can be generalized and shared as a template, we know that other dance artists really are going to need a way to reduce the labor of data entry. Right. So what we imagine doing initially with linked data was to ingest kind of existing subject authorities. Looking at the Library of Congress subject authorities looking at V off, what does V off stand for? I'm not okay. This is all this is a little new to me as well, you know, reaching out to my network of people to help me know what's going on. I understand on a high concept level, what is happening. But when it comes to this, I've, I spent my summer reading a book on linked open data. I'm still getting there. Yeah, well, I'm with you, Sarah. I am certainly not an expert. I am I'm with you. And I've also been really gratified to find like Stephen McCall, who you have two people on this campus who know a lot more than I do who are really useful advisors. But so there are a variety of subject authorities. One of the ones is, I think it's V off is run by the getting museum and it's very heavily around visual arts. I could have that wrong. It could be a different one that I'm forgetting. And also we looked at wiki data. Right. Because wiki data has authority records on a lot of artists. Yeah. And we actually found that wiki data. So the idea was we were just going to suck in place of birth, birth date, awards, whatever biographical information the subject authority had and not have to type it in. So that was our initial. How can we how can we reduce our labor. But then what we encountered was that none of them had a lot of information about dance artists. A lot of what we found was wrong. And especially there was especially scant information about women, BIPOC artists. They just they were not in the record. And that that caused us to think. And by us, I want to include Worley gig. They are the developers we've been working on working with. We've also been kind of working on them. They would probably the first to say we're building on a system that they developed called collective access, which is an open source cataloging software. And they have been really good collaborators with us. They have been willing to think about how the software that they developed can shift and change and accommodate our needs. And I credit them with this realization that what if we could not only ingest this information from existing subject authorities, but also push archival information back to to a data commons to help enrich the record to help populate the record with some of these missing voices. So they began. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we were also realizing that wiki data had more information. They didn't have a lot, but it had more information on the dance artists we were working with versus L's no boundaries collection than any of the other subject authorities. And because it's crowdsourced, it also then opens a lot of doors in terms of opportunities for this kind of for conceiving of the idea of pushing data back to it. So that's become a focus of ours now. We are thinking about this kind of multi-part system right now. I'll draw with my hands like here down here. This is wiki data. It has like a hundred million pieces of linked open data crowdsourced right here in the middle is something that we're calling the dancing digital commons, which is a data commons of dance that we imagine we can. We're going to have to find a balance between democratizing and curating that is going to be a big part of this next step of research. This piece here, this dancing digital commons can periodically push data to wiki data and it can also ingest data from wiki data. And then there's a constellation of other archives and eventually hopefully other individuals who can push data to the commons. And so the dancing digital sorry the no boundaries archive that we're building that is one that's going to be able to both ingest from and push data back to the dancing digital commons. But now it's really exciting for us that other performing arts organizations have expressed real interest in working with us and letting us try using their data to populate this commons. So we have two really great big partners right now Brooklyn Academy of Music and Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. Both old storied presenters of performing arts that have done a great job in terms of like they are the leaders within performing arts preservation and access. And so we're really excited to be working with them. And I can show you a thing if you want me to share my screen and show you a thing. Yeah, let me I'm going to make you a co-host. I meant to do that earlier. I'd love to see. Okay, so this is a very early demo of what we're working on. Worley Gig has and specifically I'm going to credit why Ian Kwan is one of the developers at Worley Gig. She's been working really hard on this to use Wikibase and the wiki data integration model to create this digital data commons that's based on our collection, which is the no boundaries collection. I'll show you what that looks like. That's got it's actually bigger than this. This needs to be updated. You can get a sense of, you know, here are the solos. Actually, you might not actually be able to see this all that well. Let me drive this a little bit to make it bigger. Come on, baby. And somewhere in between. Okay, having trouble with my mouse. But like here's a solo no less black rain. Rain is choreographed by B.B. Miller. Costume designed by Muriel Stockdale. We have a little duplicate here. Maybe B.B. did some of the costumes and Muriel did some. I'm not sure. The composer was Herne Gagbois. Lighting designer Jezelle Mason is sort of the she's dancing all of these in our projects. So she's kind of becomes the center. So this is the no boundaries collection or most of it uploaded to wiki data structured as linked open data. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if we're running out of time if it's helpful to talk about the triples you can see here or what do you think Sarah? I think we have about 10 more minutes. It's 11 43 right now. And we have the full hour. Okay. Well, if you like me are are new to linked open data, what I'll say is according to my understanding of it, it's a way of structuring data to give a piece to give each piece of data a stable address on the internet kind of like a URL, but it's called a URI. And the way that it's structured is in triples. It's two entities with a property that that connects them. So in this case, it's going to be the piece jumping the broom. Jumping the broom is one entity. David Rousseff is another entity. And the property that connects them is that David Rousseff choreographed jumping the broom. So this one triple here, this is one chunk of linked open data. Yeah. For linked data. And it's, it's open because it's not proprietary that his name and the name of the piece are not proprietary. Yes. So that's the no boundaries collection. We can look at it in this nodal graph on wiki data. This is what wiki data has, this might take a minute, has that is pertinent to the artists in the no boundaries collection. They obviously have more information about dance artists. But this is what wiki data has for the dance artists in the no boundaries collection. They have 51 records. Right. And it's interesting, like pick one. If you can see. Yeah. Like Jaula will it Joe Zoller is a very prolific choreographer. But clearly what's happened is that the places that have the that have the resources to contribute to wiki data are the universities she's taught at. The awards she's gotten that Bessie and you'll see a lot of these folks won Guggenheim fellowships. Her work is not her work is not represented on wiki data hardly at all. Like these are where she's taught where she's performed. She was a MacArthur fellow like. Yes. These are the places that like so we're missing the work. That's what wiki data is missing largely. Then if we add I'm just going to add all of them together in the interest of time but BAM has thousands of records. Jacob's fellow has thousands of records. This again this little compare demo is just pulling records that are relevant to the artists in the no boundaries collection to those 10 choreographers. So you can see immediately it's going to take a minute to load. I'm riffing. I'm riffing. I'm vamping. Dancing here while we're loading. But you can already see that it's loading a lot more records by our relationships. Yeah. I think it's fascinating when we're looking at this kind of graphic. So my area of scholarship is is digital rhetoric. And from a rhetorical standpoint you can really assess audience of each of these entities wiki data and BAM and Jacob's pillow and no boundaries by seeing the type of data that they value and include. I think that's that's a really interesting you can you can you can make some basic assumptions about the organization when you look at the data that they are able to provide that they contain. I think that's a really important point. One thing that we've learned by this visualization and I don't know how much I need to zoom in here because you can kind of get the idea that there's a lot of artists and a lot of or these are the 10 artists again but so much more work. Yeah. This is actually the work being represented not just where they thought. But a couple of things ripping off of what you said one is when we there was another demo that allowed us to search for a particular artist and I don't need to share that right now but it was a oops did I stop sharing I tried to stop. You're still on. Oh just moved it and moved to stop sharing. Okay. So we would put in the name of an artist and it was such a clear visual representation of who's missing because George Balanchine was a name we put in a European male choreographer. And you know I think it was 380 or something like that records came up his work his relationships his students. He is in the record people have taken the time to put him in the record of Wikipedia as well because wiki data also includes the data from Wikipedia. Then we put in Martha Graham who's a white who was a white female choreographer and we just saw it shrink. Some of her work was represented but she maybe had had 60 records as opposed to 300 and something. Then we put in Alvin Ailey who is a was an incredibly prolific African American contemporary choreographer and initially it's it's more now but we got 10 records for him and they were all awards he won. I mean this is a person who whose work has reached you know he's made 80 he made 80 plus important works seminal works of dance that reached I want to say and I've read this so I don't think I'm making this up 25 million audience members yeah live audience you know like really important artists in this country and there's no he has no digital footprint yeah harder to study he's harder to find so that was one thing that this visualization helped us understand but the other thing is as we've been working on the archive being able to come back to this visualization has been really instructive because it's like oh Robert Battle is floating over here in a little cloud by himself there's actually no connection to the rest of the archive yet we have to illustrate that relationship right so that's also been really interesting um but we're hoping to build this for real this is a this is um one of the for real things that will happen with this is um clear attribution so if you were to click on a work or an artist you would you would get sent to the archive that links to the archive that provided the information um it might even have been with this um you know universal viewer and I have stuff I'm talking about it might even be that you could watch a you could watch a video by clicking on the link that's that's a dream for me I'm not sure how close we are to that and obviously that's going to depend on um it's going to be on a case by case basis in terms of who grants the rights for that to happen but what we want is this kind of um universal finding aid where um archives connects together you can find those materials you can use those materials um and you can visualize the connections that happen across the field that's what we want that's what we're hoping to build well well you're taking you know pragmatic steps towards that and have like that long term goal and short term goals and mid term goals and they're all connected in a way that makes sense I can see the through line um I I just I love hearing every single time you talk about this project because I learned so much and I just uh it makes it easier for me when I talk to other people about their projects because everything in your project always seems to me like it's so well thought out and um planned and I like that about your project you might not feel like that I don't I mean I'll just let that sit there then if that's what it feels like to you it has been um research in the best way though that you know I think one of the things that makes me love being an academic is that you can follow a thread and and you don't necessarily know where it's gonna take you yeah and I really did not know where this was gonna take me but it's exciting and um yeah it's fun yeah I've been doing a lot of uh sort of familiarizing myself with ontologies and vocabularies and how those get incorporated into projects um I I don't work in collective access but I work in OMECA S which is a similar platform um and it has a lot of the same you know qualities and values for linked open data and organization of of items and assets and the ability to associate things with each other um in the way that you're describing and the the idea of because we have so many different OMECA projects happening at the Alabama Digital Humanities Center the the balance that I see people constantly having to find between um their desire to describe something rhetorically specifically and accurately and their need to be able to describe it in universal terms it's always such there's such a there's such a um a pull with that right and I think that um the incorporation of the wiki-based commons for your project is really pulling that into focus in a way that is translatable outside of dance um into other projects that that I'm seeing happening um just as sort of a a framework for finding what's really truly necessary in your descriptive metadata that can transcend the particulars of your individual projects right like yeah there are some data that's going to be in no boundaries that is not going to be in the dancing digital commons right because it's going to be very very specific to the vision and the mission of no boundaries and may not may not be universalized yeah well thank you for bringing this up because I'm just like hey we made a thing and look here are the properties but there is so much conversation and consideration around what are those properties and um an example is that a property used in dance on wiki data a lot is ballet master now that is not a term that we want to perpetuate it doesn't work with the no boundaries project at all um and um but since it's so present in the in the data using it would allow the data would would allow our project to be found more readily yeah yeah so so it's that question of like how can we push can we push dance studies here how much pushing can we do how much of new world-making can we make here in terms of how we describe things and how much will how much do we need to be discovered in a in a in a in a way that conforms to existing structures and standards yeah this is the eternal yeah like metadata yet question right there's metadata data librarians across the world having these very conversations about you know um terms that are no longer appropriate and even organized in a fashion that is no longer appropriate to the society that we live in but like it is so embedded that it's impossible to weed out so how do you find ways to um create relationships with terms so so you have the term ballet map master and perhaps you know within within your ontology you have relational synonyms built in so that it's you know these are the terms that we use now and when somebody types in ballet master you get a uh instead see this list right right or if you hit ballet master in you know another project it will take you to these these these newer terms right a note in it right and it's it's fascinating how a project like this can also move forward the language and the values of the field i i might have this wrong but i think it was in an article by maria patchouelli at prat um i think that's where i'm getting this information but that you know a wiki data system like this has a lot more flexibility though too it's because um because it's fungible because it's possible to find things in multiple ways um maybe as opposed to sort of an older archive structure an older catalog structure there's some opportunity yes yeah so that's also exciting yeah i i'm excited about it i'm excited because you have the opportunity to do so many so many things and make decisions about some of these things in a way that is thoughtful and progressive but still connected to the history and the legacy of your topic so i think we're about out of time and i could just talk about this forever and i'm so grateful for you joining me um and i hope that whoever you know accesses the podcast will come all the way to the end because i think a lot of the really good stuff has come in the last you know 20 minutes or 15 minutes here but um thank you so much for joining me today for this conversation thank you so much for having me it's always um both fun and instructive to talk to you so i really appreciate it yeah yeah i have um i i'm probably going to need to chat with you about a couple of things sometime in the future but um it's it's kind of in the pipeline so but good luck on your project i know that we're waiting to hear about um some future funding uh my fingers are crossed i have a you know a great deal of confidence in this project and i'm so grateful that i'm able to to interact with it thank you so much yeah all right bye