 All right, so I'm going to be talking to you about another case study in digital humanities, and this is a completely, actually it's been great because I think what Stephen Barry was doing was very, very different than what Eric Miller does. Very different models for things that the digital can do to help us as scholars. So this is a radically different approach. This is, as Sarah was talking about yesterday, an example of simulation and visualization. And so rather than big data, it's actually very intensive, small data, research into a very specific kind of case study. And it's a project that I was involved with for quite a few years called Virtual Vaudeville. And so I'm going to be talking through the development of this project. We have the benefit of hindsight because it's a project that took several years to complete. It was completed somewhat differently than it originally anticipated, but most of the original objectives were in some way met. And then it has reached an end point that we hoped that it wouldn't reach. So there is a cautionary tale at the end as well that I think is really, really important. And in some ways the process that we went through, because it was quite early on in this period of digital humanities and technologies have changed to some extent, but in a good way because a lot of what we struggled with early on and challenges that we met would now be much, much easier to do. And nobody has done it yet. So this is I think the moment for another Virtual Vaudeville that would be much less expensive and a lot easier. So Virtual Vaudeville. So we started out with this question, how to represent historical performances and whether digital technology would provide a way to do that. And actually the background a little bit, I think it's very helpful, particularly in our context given the kind of institute that we have, this came about initially. I've had a long-term interest in particularly actually in using digital technology in live performance, which I continue to do and with robotic installations and all kinds of fun things. So I've been really interested in that both as a practitioner and as a scholar and theorist focusing on digital, it's the sort of stuff we're dealing with next week, right? Not so much the D.H. stuff at all. But because I had a history in playing around with digital technologies for quite a while already by 2001 when this project began, I was invited to this National Science Foundation sponsored meeting called NINCH, National Initiative for a Shared Cultural Heritage. And people like Frank Hildey were there, Bruce McConnacky, Susan Katlechel, a whole bunch of people who had interest in scholarships. Some had more and some had less experience with the technology, but it all had an interest in that. And then there were people in lots of different humanistic fields as well and this was because NSF was at that point in time wanting to invest in the use of digital technologies beyond the sciences. So they were looking for some really risky but exciting projects that could demonstrate the usefulness of computer science in lots of different disciplines. So there was this big group, there were presentations, but the most exciting part of it were a series of these working groups so the people interested in theater and performance studies were in one group and various historians and literary scholars would get together just to brainstorm possible projects. And as it happened, we were brainstorming the idea of visualizing this problem. How do you represent historical performance? Is that something that a monograph can't do? A monograph can do a fantastic job analyzing, doing the deep study, but it doesn't actually capture the performative elements. And a film doesn't really capture that either because there's a passivity of it and most importantly it doesn't capture the audience and the dynamics of the event. Furthermore, your passive, you sit through the whole thing so it doesn't gain the sort of depth, the historical content, it doesn't provide you that historical context that a monograph would. So is there a way to bring together the sort of historical rigor of a monograph and the complexity of that kind of analysis with the visualization of a film and then somehow incorporating the audience in a way that none of these things had really been doing at that point. So that was our big project. And then we settled on a talk about why actually on Vaudeville as a secondary, partly it was because Bruce McConnacky and Susan Catlin were both really interested in Vaudeville at that point. That hadn't been one of my areas. I now love Vaudeville. It's like, that sounds great, I'd be into that. But that was a model. As it turned out, we were the only group out of that niche thing that actually ended up developing a proposal to submit to NSF and we were funded and we finished the project. So it was actually overall a pretty happy story and probably not a bad, as these things go, not a bad investment for them, sort of how these things work out. So tomorrow you're going to be brainstorming your projects. Some of you already have projects, which is wonderful. But my fantasy is even one pair of you get together and sort of have some brainstorm and it turns into something that would be amazing because these things can happen. All right. So we were thinking of this for pedagogical purposes. So when you're teaching performance, obviously we use, we replays, we show film clips, but how do you capture the experience of a live performance? For the documentation of historical research and for hypothesis testing. All right. So the solution that we came up with was what we ended up calling the live performance simulation system. And again, I'm emphasizing before getting into the particular case study, the case study was really an example, something that we were using to test this overall idea. So what we're really coming up with, a system that could be generalized to lots of different historical instances, not just theatrical, but paratheatrical sorts of events as well, any kind of performative event. So one aspect of it was to model theatrical spaces. And there had been in the reading, one of the readings you had today sort of go through a history of some of the early modeling examples. There certainly had been by that time, a good history of modeling theatrical spaces. Then this at that point, it was sort of something that hadn't really been done, animating performances within those spaces. And then what really hadn't been done in the most complex aspect was reconstructing a community of spectators, okay? So our prototype application was virtual vaudeville and specifically, in our first niche meeting, we actually came up with the whole, basically up until that prototype application. We sort of came up with that already. And then as we met, we settled on a really specific set of case studies. So we decided New York City, 1895 for various reasons, one because that was a moment just before, just at the very, very dawn of film. So there wasn't cinematic evidence yet, so we could reconstruct it. And again, as I said, our goal was to create a generalizable system that was applicable to any kind of performance event and to develop reusable strategies. All right, so just as an example of a precedent, up to that moment in 2001, the closest precedent that existed was the Theatron project with Richard Beachham had created with his group in its visualization group at King's College. I'm sure some of you were familiar with this. And the thing about the Theatron project, it was specifically online 3D models of European theaters at that point. So they did quite a few 19 European theaters. And what was different and interesting about it was it wasn't simply static models that they created still images of, but they actually did create these models so that people could move within them. They could explore the models and they could do this online in an easily accessible way. So the technology they used for that was VRML, very early on. These no longer work. This is part of the story that I'm telling. So all of these technologies, none of these are actually real, even though they presented themselves at the time of standards. The technology moves on and you don't have an interest in maintaining a standard that is showing you work that nobody would want to create anywhere. The resolution now is so much greater, the sort of models we could create. So it's better greater that new standards are taken over. So Theatron, again, was a really cool resource just for exploring the theater architecture, not any of the other elements, not the performance elements, not the cultural elements, not the analysis. But still, it was fantastic for what it was doing. But it was starting to feel by the end of the 2000s, it was no longer useful, it was just archaic technology. They tried to keep it going, there was a second iteration. And then finally, Theatron 3 was the final iteration, and they created that in second life, which at that moment in time, really seemed like it was taking over the world, it was going to be really great. So they recreated all of their models, the original models, on an island in second life. And then it could rely on second life's technology to let you navigate around them. And you can actually, I'll show you a little video clip of the way it looked. We're moving through the space. So there's the theater of Pompey. And then there's one of our little second life avatars moving around and wherever you want them to go. And you could stage performances in second life using the avatars. There were a number, as Alicia knows, that's written a lot about. Lots of performances happening in second life. And you could do it in the theaters if you wanted to. So there he is, just as all Roman audiences would tend to do, just flying around like that. That's right. So there we are in the theater. So that's Theatron. And so Theatron ended up closing its doors completely in 2012 because the grant that they had to pay to be in second life expired and they didn't have the money anymore to keep being in there. And so they just shut down their island and stopped doing their thing. So Theatron is now history. All right, so then we come to virtual vaudeville. So as I said, the performance was specifically in the Union Square Theater, which was one of the major vaudeville houses, very typical vaudeville house in New York City had been demolished, sadly. So, but that was actually part of the challenge as well. So that we had to do the historical archival research in order to reconstruct it. And I said a prototype of the system, we already went through these. All right, so we were funded at the level of $900,000, which is a lot of money for a theater project, which is really nice. As it turned out, again, it could be done for much, much, much less now. And to some extent, one thing that I learned not being used to big federal research projects is a huge amount of that goes to overhead. So you actually end up with less of that than you might think. But also we had a group of collaborators all over the country, and I'll be showing some of those, many of them theater scholars who were all subcontracted, and this actually will play into some of the issues that Stephen was talking about and that you might be talking about later about the ethics of working with students. We were, because we had this grant, we were in the position where I could hire graduates from our program full time to get credit and work on this project. So we didn't have to rely on classes or student labor. This was all paid and credited work, so that was nice too. And some of the more expensive work, we subcontracted to some computer scientists to develop parts of, very simple talk about as prototypes. None of those actually ever made it to the public because computer scientists who get grants are used to doing these things that they then sort of prototype and develop in concept, but the idea of actually having people use them wasn't sort of part of their mindset and it was fine because we learned a lot from the prototypes. But the virtual vaudeville that actually went to the public, probably about maybe half of the funds, the ones that actually, ironically the money that went to the theater departments funded every penny of what actually ended up in the public virtual vaudeville site. The rest was all prototypes. All right, so one of the things that excited me at the time and continues to excite me about the virtual vaudeville project and about this kind of digital scholarship is that it breaks down the boundaries that we tend to think of between scholarship and practice. But if you think about the goal to recreate this historical performance in vaudeville, so there are a bunch of different elements to that. So first of all, it should exist as a scholarly, you know, kind of scholarly edition, hyper-mediated, wonderfully rich, you know, with all the archival information embedded in it. But so it would be equivalent to the scholarly work of producing a scholarly edition of a text. The text that we were presenting had never been published. This material hadn't been written about. So this was original scholarship presented in digital form. We weren't simply taking a scholarly book and translating it. And the sort of questions that we were asking, what exactly did this look like, how would this act work, all the lacuna in the evidence that we had to fill in, we wouldn't have asked in another kind of form. So the form drove the research. So it was a scholarly work that involved all of the levels that Sarah was talking about of collection, analysis, and dissemination, sort of all in one. But it was also a performance. Because, you know, we were creating, as you'll see, it entirely animated and it was motion capture. But it was, we had an actor, we had to have a text, we had to have the music, we had to have the costume, we had to have the lighting, we had to have absolutely everything. All, it was a performance. So I found myself as the overall project director. I was directing the scholarly project, but I was also a director-director working with my actors and doing all the things that I do, which was really fun for me. So it was bringing together all those aspects of the things that I love to do. And then finally, unlike, this is like one of the great challenges of this kind of thing. And Steve's talk got into this in both theatrical productions where there are genres of performance, where we have some expectations about how a performance works and what the production process is, whether it's sort of the conventional, you have your designers and directors and design meetings and auditions and rehearsals and or a devised piece, which now develops its own conventions. There are conventions that you have for most of the production work that we do. And for publishing as well, if you're going to publish an article or you're going to publish a book, there are these very clear conventions. And you can be creative within them and violate them and change them, but there are these clear structures. Here it's a blank slate. It's like, what does this interface look like? What is the audience going to experience? What are we going to present? It's wide open. So the creative part then has to do with the whole, the entire presentational format as well, the genre that we're creating of what it is. So that's also, and it might be in 50 years when people start to really develop this, we will have this sort of taxonomy that Steve is talking about. That will make life a lot easier. People will be doing a lot more of it, but in some ways it will be a lot less fun. So it could be fun at the very beginning of film before people had all these conventions, you could do anything. And so this is a really neat point, I think, to be doing this kind of thing. All right. So the production team we had then, so I was the overall director, or as we say, the research biz, the principal investigator. And then, so there was the computer part of it. And as it happened, as I said, we had some computer people working on game design and even AI stuff that didn't end up incorporated into the project. So I'm not mentioning them, but they were at Monterey graduate program. And at Georgia Tech. But as far as, so that you can see what actually it takes to present something, as it turned out, all the computer work that we needed to create the virtual vaudeville site that went live was right here in this department. And that actually is also part of what makes why I think this project happened and could happen. Because we really ultimately, the things that happened were the things that we were directing and control of and the things that were far away. I wasn't there every day to be going down and say, what do you actually have it and where are we going with it and is it working? So those, again, stuck in prototype mode, but the stuff that we could do here. And so fortunately, we were in a fantastic position. And hopefully more and more schools are in this position. But we've had a computer animation program, as I mentioned, since the 1990s. So we have students who are trained in dramatic media and any of whom are really invested in theater and use their media and performance. So they were like, perfect. So the animator was a graduate from that program who had done the motion capture for me and my production of The Tempest and various other projects. I was like, part of this great team already and was a fantastic and still is. He's now a tenure track professor of animation. He's a really great guy and this is his full-time job for four years. Was working on virtual vaudeville. And then we had some other students who paid hourly to help out with all. You'll see there are lots of little details and things that need to be done with the animation. And also created the interactive design website as well, the same group. And then the historical research. So I did some of it. I ended up actually doing a lot of the all the little cracks, the things that nobody else ended up doing that needed it to happen, which was sort of fun. I did a lot of architectural researches that are going around to theaters around the country, 19th century theaters and taking pictures of what the doorknobs looked like, but all these funny little things that you need to model. If you need to put something there. But C.B. Davis, who was on the faculty here at the time, took the lead in researching, recreating the scripts, doing all the archival work. Bruce McComachy was doing the research into the audience and the demographics of the audience. We had musical historian Larry Worcester, architectural design team. So we had a group of wonderful historians working with us. And then in terms of the theatrical production side of it, I functioned as a director, we had a choreographer who had a history in jazz dance and musical theater. We had our costume, our costume shop manager helped us build costume so we could photograph them and create the textures for them. Sets and lighting, one of our acting faculty who specializes actually in vaudeville was the motion capture performer and then our musical director. All right, so real quickly, why do we end up using this case study other than the fact that some of our people were interested in it? It turned out to be perfect for this kind of application as a case study, as a sample. First of all, because it has really obviously profound interests and impact, vaudeville, as you all know, was a huge, huge cultural force whose impact continues to be felt. But most students, and even at that time a lot of theater scholars, it was erased from our histories of theater almost entirely. And of course, Bruce was one of the people who was helping to bring that kind of popular theater back into the fore. So it was a key window into the sort of popular theater that theater history at that point still hadn't really excavated fully. And of course, a wonderful view into the cultural life of America in the 20th century in so many different ways. Particularly as you know, and the Union Square Theater was a great example of this because so many people came together. Every facet of New York society was brought together. And we specifically chose this theater because of course it has the boxes where the most wealthy people go just to be seen in the boxes, the partier level for the upper middle class types, two levels of balcony. So all of the Italian and Jewish and Irish immigrants who were being, they found out by the performers would be in the second balcony and in the third balcony. And then a big section of the very back of the third balcony was exclusively for African Americans with a separate entrance. So you had every facet in all the problematics of American society at that time represented in that space. And because for our practical purposes, we wanted to be doing original historical research, but we also wanted to create this project. So the material hadn't been studied, but it was very easy to find. We knew where the archives were. It was recent enough that there was a lot of it. So that was also very useful. And then finally, because Vaudeville, unlike doing, say, Shakespeare, you know, the whole play, or, you know, Ibsen, these are short acts, right? So if we're going to do it piece by piece, it was great. We could do a whole act and it's only five minutes, 13 minutes, you know. And we could do it with, it was modular in that way. So we could do a whole series of them. So we ended up creating one act, doing animations for a second act. And then the thought was it might develop on and we could develop an entire evening of Vaudeville. All right, so they said the theater that we were doing was the Union Square Theater that we were reconstructing from 1895. And that theater had actually gone through a major renovation. And there was no good documentation of that, no good image of that documentation. So this is a engraving of the theater just before it had been renovated. So there was some sort of a renovation. After that, we had, of course, lots of descriptions and archival material about it. But that's the only image that we had to work with, which was kind of fun. So we had to extrapolate from other theaters that had been restored around the country from the same period, from the many descriptions of it. There were floor plans for the seating charts. So we could actually use those exactly, so that was easy to do. So this is our renovated version of the theater. The drops are actually historical drops that our one of our historians got for us. And as you see, every single detail is justified. I mean, of course, a lot of it is speculative. We didn't know exactly what the painting would be like. But we came up with good justifications and good evidence for all of it. And within virtual vaudeville, every single detail is documented and all the archival material is reproduced. So you can see exactly what we did in second guess and come up with your own thoughts. Here are some more details. So for example, those panels, you could see that they had those really ornate panels and that engraving, which looked to me a lot like Louis Sullivan's panels in Chicago, so in the Wainwright building. So we actually took those panels and reconstructed it. So it's exactly the same period. That's the kind of thing. That was one of the most of the other details come from theaters, but. All right, and then the two acts that we focused on initially. Frank Bush, an ethnic comic who is particularly he did a whole range of, because that was one of the most exciting things about vaudeville, is it brought together every group of immigrants. So you had the blackface acts, you had Asian Americans of all different kinds. You had the Irish, you had the Jewish, and actually he did all of them. But he was particularly famous for his stage Jew. And of course, he was a Gentile, since he was in all of these acts. And of course, the famous performer of the German was the Weber and Fields, who were Jewish. So you'd always have different groups representing each other. So there he is, is Solomon. You'll be seeing him animated his famous stage Jew. And then Sandal the Magnificent, the first great strong man. So in terms of the process, we started before we could do any of our animations, we had to do the research, basic research. So we started by doing the researching of the acts and disinvolved traditional archival research. So our team of historians did what they always do and went around. One of the sort of sad anecdotes of the story, as it turned out, CB Davis was, as I said, doing the research specifically in the Frank Bush act. And you found all the wonderful archival materials for the scripts he found, joke stories he found, some scripts that could be put together and extrapolated, lots of newspaper reports, all in every ounce of that it was available in the virtual logical site for people to look at and see. There was no known, certainly no film, unlike there was a film of Sandal that Edison created, but there was no film of Frank Bush. And that was cool, we liked that, because it was more of an example of what we would need to reconstruct with the digital technology. We didn't think there was any sound recording either, but we weren't totally sure. And he actually, none of the archives had anything. But he actually found somebody on eBay had this huge collection of wax cylinder recordings, he had no idea what any of it meant. But there was a recording of Frank Bush. So we actually did find through that process a recording of Frank Bush's own voice and the person who sold us the wax recording put it on a CD because we had no way to play a wax recording. So we had it, and that was on the site. You could actually hear the real Frank Bush on the site. The sad part is that downstairs in this very building, CB was teaching a class in popular theater, 19th century popular theater, and was very proud of it. Just gotten, we got the physical wax cylinder that we paid for it. And it was a wonderful thing. It should have given it to the library right away. But instead, he showed it to his class in this box. He said, look what I got. And it flew out and crashed into a million pieces. Anyway, so then we did the modeling of the historical performances. Sandow was great because he was so famous, they measured his body. So we used those measurements to create the model of him. In the case of Frank Bush, there were lots of pictures that we were using. So there were pictures of him without any makeup. So the act that CB recreated, Frank Bush comes on as the Irishman who's looking for this no good Jewish glass pudder, the guy that puts in the glass windows, who had done him wrong. And he gives a whole story about what had happened with him. And then he's looking for him and gets distracted because he sees a pop. And so he goes to get a pint. He goes away and there's a quick change. He walks around and comes back as Solomon the Jew says, ah, I slipped him. Great. So we had two characters, which was fun to animate. All right. So we created the models and all the clothing. It was all done with photographic textures of the faces and the costumes. And this is back in 2000 and the grant was 2003 is when we actually started the project. So it was done in Maya. The technology is improved, but I'm actually still pretty proud of the way that the animations look. We use motion capture. So you guys all saw the optical motion cameras that are still in the lab that we used for this. And that he's actually in that very lab that you were. He's at the IPL, the interactive performance lab, one of our actors who was able to do a standing back flip. So he did that part of it for standout. And I'll show you just the, as I said, this wasn't this was on the website as a standalone movie. We didn't actually put it into the theater into the act. But I'll show you the film. Oh, this is actually this is the process of creating Frank Bush. This is not sand out. Where's my sand out? Do my sand out? All right. I actually don't have my sand out here. It's actually still available on the virtual Bible site. You can see it. Wonderful act. We actually found the original score for the music that they played for the send out act. So that was me, too. But what I have here, which is also, you know, I wanted to show you. This is the to show the process of the motion capture. This is actually for Frank Bush. So this is one moment in the Frank Bush scene, starting with the motion capture and then applying the motion capture to the character model and then adding the the texturing of the model and then putting it in the theater space and then adding the audience. So you can see that whole process. Amen. Walk into a Hebrew clothing store and try on a coat and vest. But he turned his back. Run out of the store. So the policeman came by and pulled out his pistol. So that's the only thing you could call that excitedly, shoot him in the pants. The coat and vest is mine. Oh, oh. And speaking of pants. Here comes the Irish. Oh, oh. And then you'll see in the other clips that I show you, there's actually a little bit, we enhanced it a bit more. The beard is a real beard, and that was sort of maddened, and the fabric actually moves around this physics added to that in the final version as well. So we did the mocap, we did the facial capture for the expressions, which at that point was extremely painstaking, because you really had to go almost frame by frame. The facial capture technology has gotten light years better now, so it's a lot easier than it was. And oh, here we got the sand down. All right. This is the first part of his act, then he goes on to do the back, but that was the part where, reputedly, the wealthy women in the boxes would faint. And then you go backstage and pay like $500, which at the time is an unbelievable amount of money to feel his muscles. All right. So then finally, and this for me was the most interesting part of the whole process, placing the acts in the theater. Because I talked about this huge audience, there were, well, we estimated about seats for about $1,200, Bruce estimated there probably would be about $900 during a matinee performance of the sort that we were creating, and we estimated how many would be in each part of the house, or 800. So we had to recreate 800 spectators. And actually when we were originally designing this, our plan was to create it online in the way that you're going to see for just as rendered videos, but also we were doing it within a game engine. Our prototype actually had you moving through the game engine, particularly at that time, animating 800 spectators was incredible. So we actually came up with a way to do it really super efficiently that actually worked. So we actually, if you see it, you have to look really closely because you don't see most of the spectators. Most of the time, every spectator was responding appropriately, we actually scripted the responses for each demographic. So the Irish folks would laugh at certain jokes and the Jews would laugh at other jokes that the wealthy people would respond to some things. So they're actually all animated separately. So what we did is according to gender, class, ethnicity, we scripted those categories. And here are our different character types. So what we did is we created, we defined 32 spectator groups of these different combinations of class, gender, demographics, and came up with scripts for each of those and then took several, a couple hundred photographs of students and faculty and people around UGA for different faces and actually changed the face on top of the animation. So the animation would move the same way underneath it to create different hats and different accessories and different color suits and things to create the illusion that there are even more. But if you look closely, there were only 32 separate types of movements that were going on. And actually it worked pretty nicely. So there are just some examples of the audiences. Those are super simple models that are really cool in order to animate them. But with the photographic texture, particularly because you're not zooming in on them, they work pretty well. They did their job. So as I said, each group reacted differently. And then we had three to five different faces and costumes per group. So if you do your math, three to five times 32 is the different. And then variations of hats and hair and beards. And then we also created, and this was part of the prototype, but we created specific four pairs of spotlight spectators. So this is the mother and the parterre. And we had the daughter, who was actually my two-year-old daughter at the time. We used her as a model. The wealthy guy, African-American, middle-class guy, Irish guy. So we had them, who was sitting next to a Jewish guy. And we scripted their reactions throughout the entire act as well. And these are models that are the same quality as the actual actor models. So we had four spectator groups, and then used MoCAP for those as well, and created inner monologues. And that was actually part of what Bruce McConnacky, that was part that did use students, he actually taught a class where they spent the whole class studying the demographics of 19th century audiences. And they defined these characters in the class. And then we used that as the basis for the scripts that we created. And then hyperbedia notes, which was very, very important, is, you know, I think, for me, what made it a scholarly project is that it was thoroughly documented. So throughout, as you watch the act at any given moment, there were notes attached to objects, like I said, in the theater, every aspect of the theater attached to the timeline. So if he gives a joke, you know, what does that joke mean? Or if he uses a term, you know, like puttner, what does that mean? You can click on that and find that out. Also, in terms of the reconstruct, where you start singing a song, it's like, what's a song? How do we know what the melody was? Which as a song story, I'd be happy to tell you. Every little detail is documented there. And then introductory essays, critical analyses, all the archival evidence with the photographs and the scripts and the programs and the reviews. Everything we use is linked either to an object or a moment in the act so that you could see that. Recordings, film, the audience dynamics. All right, so then finally, the interface. So one, fortunately, or really wisely, I think, but not wisely enough. We did anticipate some of the problems that we had. And it just goes to show, of course, that doesn't always save you anyway. So I was concerned from the beginning, I want this to last. And technology is going to change. So one thing that we did is we were careful to separate the content from the delivery system. So I still have all of the models, all of the animations, everything. So it could easily be put, and those were all done in standard formats. And they all are still usable. So the hypermedia notes, we did all that in straight HTML. So we created a custom interface so that there was a window. But the window was just reading in straight. So those all still work, and they all, the links still work with each other. And that's actually still available on the Virtual Vibral site, although hypermedia notes. But in order to display it online, we had to create some sort of application. And we used what back in 2005, when we did the actual application, seemed like the surest step, shockwave, which was at that point the only technology we could really use to create a fly-through of the theater and let you click on different things to see what was going on, and to create exactly the custom interface that I'll show you in a minute that we wanted. And everybody was doing shockwave, just like everybody was creating CD-ROMs with Macromedia Director. They were the same program, basically. And it turned out to be a kind of bad bet, unfortunately, in terms of sustainability. But we created a performance viewer and a theater fly-through app in shockwave, and that was the heart of the site. And I'll show you how those work. And then we created the prototype of a fully immersive game using, at that time, there was no way to deliver that online, but there was a game engine called GameBro. And we actually created that. These days, it could be done in Unity. A lot of it even could be presented online. It would be much cheaper. It worked really, really well. At that time, GameBro was the only thing that gave us. There were some very technical things we needed in order for the 900 audience members and the expressions and the movement. And it was the only one that did that. All right. So now I'm going to, what happened was in, over time, the shockwave was acquired. It used to be Macromedia. Adobe bought it. Adobe stopped supporting it. And so gradually, from about 2012 to about 2015, first, certain machines wouldn't work. And I started getting emails. I teach this in my classes. It's not working. You don't know what's going on. And early on, I could tell them, well, if you use this kind of machine and not that, or if you turn this thing off, and for their workarounds early on, that stopped working until eventually, by now, it doesn't work on anything. So what I did for you guys is I actually went to, I had our IT guy load up an old PC. Actually, it was a Mac, but with the PC partition running XT, Windows XT. So I could go back and actually, so I created a little demo for you of the two different applications. So this is the fly-through application. Bottom of the screen. Oh, there we go. All right, so the way this application works is there are a series of navigational tools on the bottom of the screen that we created. The first one simply lets you jump to different parts of the theater. So you can look at the theater from the perspective of, say, the center aisle. Or, frankly, you can look at one of the boxes. You can go up to the galleries, et cetera. Here we're way up at the top of the theater. This is a nice view of this area here over the stage. And you can also fly through and around the theater. So this tool here lets you rotate. So I can rotate my view and look up and down and all around from whatever perspective I am currently in. So if I jump here, I can do the same thing. Now I'm looking around from a position sitting in one of the boxes. This is a sort of cute thing we have here, too. If you hit the space bar, you can open the front curtain and close the front curtain. You can also use the magnifying glass to zoom forward or zoom back. And then we can look around at the audience, up and down. And then you can use this tool here to move right, to move left, and basically to walk through the theater as if you're really there. And all of these controls are provided with keyboard shortcuts, too. So like a video game player, you can walk around the theater and move anywhere you like. One of the most important features of this application are the hypermedia notes. So by clicking on our hypermedia tool, you can click on any part of the theater and find out exactly what evidence we use to reconstruct that part of the theater. So for example, if I wanted to know about the main act curtain, I click on it. And I see right here exactly where we found in the archives an actual period curtain that we used for this. If I open the curtain, then I can click the city drop that we used for our Frank Bush routine. And here we get the information here, including the various places where the drops might have hung and different images of drops and references for more research. If I click on the ornamentation here, you will see a drawing that we used very heavily that was actually based on a slightly earlier version of the theater before its final renovation, but gave us some really good information about what the ornamentation would have been like in the architecture of the theater. And then in order to fill these in, we went to still existing theaters that have been reconstructed. This was from the Ohio Theater in Cincinnati and found similar images, photographed them, and created textures. So that's actually what's happening there. And of course I can zoom in to get a better look at that detail. If I click on, say, the boxes, then I get information on the demographics of who would be sitting in the boxes and how we reconstructed those boxes based on the New Victory Theater in New York City. And so on and so forth. You can get information on every little detail of the theater. Here's information on the sconces that we reconstructed based again on that line drawing information on these panels up here, which were told to you guys about the way in right panels, et cetera. And then the performance viewer. So with Shockwave, the theater's empty because you can't move around and still have all those 800 spectators and the actors, it was too heavy for that to happen. So then we animated it. And to give that sense of immersion with widely accessible online technology in 2005, and five, or even today really to make it really work. What we did is we treated it like a live TV show. So we pre-rendered eight different views with these buttons here to allow you to move from view to view. And I'll show you how that worked. This is, we created this of course in 3D so we could render out as many different perspectives as we wanted. So we rounded out eight different perspectives of the routine. So here's a close-up view. So as you switch from perspective to perspective, you continue on the same timeline. So the illusion is created that you're just jumping from one camera to another. That perspective there is the performer's own perspective. Here's a fly-through of the theater. We recreated actually all 900 audience members and they're all actually responding to every moment of the performance. So as you fly through, you can actually see them moving and when you see their faces, their responses are actually appropriate given where they are in the theater to what's happening at that moment on stage. Here we'll jump up to the gallery. And one thing that we worked hard to do is recreate the acoustics of different parts of the theater. So when you're in the gallery, you don't hear the performer nearly as well, but you hear the other spectators around you. Here you are in a box. And as you move around, you'll notice these are the hypermedia notes and these notes are specific both to what view you're in and to where you are in the place. So why is this funny? If you click on that, you see a note here that explains the joke that he's telling. And here's, he's just used the word lantern jawed as you can see a definition of lantern jawed. We're in the box section now. So there's a note here about the box section which tells us who is sitting in the boxes. If I were in a different area, let's say, I were here in the gallery. Instead it says gallery section. And here's a little information. The rule of three of Oddbill principle that Frank Bush is currently exploiting. All right, we'll go up, et cetera. Get a sense of that. And then I'm gonna show you just a little bit. One of the views is a cinematic view where we're switching different cameras. And, let's do this again. Okay. Father's socks, where can you have gone to? Well, they're clever to tell a spell. They're ivy shit, they don't know what I mean. Molly sheenie glass poutine. And with the claw he hit me on the shoulder. And for the nearest stall, I made a dive. The man who opened the stall, he chased me quickly. And he just says he hit me in the eye. And they told him what an ethom is the national. And at the dirty loaf, I defied. What's king, the ivy shit, they don't know. So you'll notice the hair looks a lot better than it did in our first, and the coat is actually moving. All right, so fine. So the impact of this. So it actually seemed to be, you know, I was pretty gratified. It did seem to have a significant impact. It's been cited a fair amount as an early model for virtual simulation systems. So it's out there. I wrote a few articles about it, but also more gratifying the other people have referred to it. So even though you can't run the site anymore, it does exist in documentation. Tonya Sutherland wrote about it in her dissertation, called it an event-based archivy, which I kind of liked. It was also picked up in the popular predate of the Boston Globe, wrote about it in American theater. And so it was written about a fair amount. And as I could tell when the site started breaking down, and I started getting these messages from all over the world, it was used in a wide range of classes and also from the site, you know, the just the statistics that would show up on the site, both in theater classes and theater history classes, but also in digital humanities classes and interface design classes and all kinds of things. So that was very nice. But, you know, one of the nicer quotes, Ken McCoy, some of you might have used his brief guide to internet resources, you know, said that it was a repeat with historical information presented. More importantly, it actually works. A wonderful kind of application of scholarship. An amazing site. Yeah. So it no longer works. So as I said, the models, the animations and the hypernotes are still functional. I've put them all on YouTube. So you can actually still see them and actually just using YouTube notes. If you, there's a, you can click and go to the next image. You still can't go randomly between them, but you can see the different views. And I recreated a lot manually, painstakingly, just with the timeline in YouTube, the links to a lot of the hypernotes and 40, they link to each other. So you actually, once you're in the system, you can get access to all of them. But it no longer works the way it was supposed to. So to summarize, some conceptual challenges with this project in retrospect. One thing that we were actually conscious of at the time, and I think is inherent in this whole project of simulations. This is true if you're doing a live simulation as well, like if you're in the globe, if you go to the globe and you see a recreation of Romeo and Juliet, the same sort of issues. And that is, you have to fill in all these details. I have to find out what the doorknobs look like. That's a strength of it, because it makes you ask questions you otherwise wouldn't. But it creates the illusion that you're seeing the real thing and that there are all these things that were speculative that people see as fact. And the extensive footnotes was an attempt, not just to be rigorous, but to counteract that. So you can actually see, that's not the real doorknob. This is what we use. And so you can tell, you know, we're putting everything out there for people to judge for themselves. But still, you don't necessarily, once you get sucked into it, you might just watch it as a consumer and not click those notes. Designification, presenting an idealized view of the past, particularly in this image. And that relates specifically to perpetuating historical stereotypes and prejudices. So again, one of the, we specifically focused on the ethnic humor because from a historical context, it needs to be examined critically, right? Because it's very rich. A lot of the stereotypes that persist today were, you know, originated on Vaudeville. So Frank Bush's Stage 2 became a model for many Jewish characters on film and television and the theater formed by Jews in the 20th century. The same thing is, of course, also with the blackface and the Irish stereotypes. So you don't want to erase that. That would be the disnification. On the other hand, the problem with the simulation is you're presenting it by recreating it, right? And this is a huge problem that for me persists. If anything, it feels more urgent now even than it did at the time. And a sign of this is at the time when we were deciding which acts to do, we decided pretty early on we were gonna do an ethnic act, we were gonna do a specialty act so that was Sam Dahl, and then we had a list of other acts to do if we had more funding and developed it. But we wanted to start with the ethnic act. And initially the theater historians, and I was part of that group, decided, all right, we're gonna do a blackface act because that's the most, right, precisely because it's the most problematic, right? And then after our meeting where we decided that, and then the technical guys and animators were in another room solving technical problems, and I was running back and forth because I was doing all of it. When I went home, we reported to each other on what we'd found, and so the historian said, we're gonna do this blackface act and these other things. I immediately got email messages from the folks at Georgia Tech in Monterey who ultimately wouldn't have made a big difference, but sent me these messages saying, we have to drop out of the project if we're not gonna go anywhere near blackface. We didn't know this going into it. We get federal funding, we have, it would create this huge controversy, we don't want it. And then as I thought about it, I started thinking, actually, it's one thing to write an essay about blackface. And from an intellectual standpoint, I understand the need to examine blackface, but through a simulation, I'm gonna be the director as well. I'm gonna be working with a white actor in motion capture doing blackface. And I can't do that either. I just feel incredibly uncomfortable doing that. And so there was some discussion. So when we were talking about, well, maybe we could distance the audience from it and sort of put these, but the whole point of this is that you can engage with it in lots of different levels and either be immersive, but then dig in and it can work for scholars but also for high school students. And it did, it was one of the appeals of it. So eventually, I just made, well, the executive decision basically, if we're gonna do blackface, that's a really interesting to examine how to do it. We need to start from the ground up with that as a problem, propose that as what we're gonna be doing, but for here, let's do something safe that nobody cares about. We'll do a Jewish stereotype. You know what I'm doing? I'm Jewish. It's okay. Interestingly, not the slightest peep about that. Nobody cares. Okay, fine. You're certain. Sounds good. So we're right with that. But also the fact that none of us where African-American was for me the most aside, we just absolutely can't go there. So in a way, I'm being facetious, but the fact that we had representation there did make a difference. So, but it's a problem and it's an unresolved problem. Again, built into the whole idea of simulation that I think we need to confront. And then finally, subsequent problem, projects. I still don't actually, I'm not aware of anything quite like virtual vaudeville, though it could be done so much more easily now. But there are some, there's the Dr. Faustus at the Rose that you could be told you briefly about yesterday. If you look at that, that's a company or Talia who will work with clients. So the University of Waterloo contracted them to create this moments of the full act of Dr. Faustus. And you'll see there is motion capture. Ha, Faustus. But you have a house but one bear hour to live and then I must be damned perpetually. Stand still, thou have a moving spears of heaven. The time may cease. So it's great. I mean, it's a wonderful thing, but it's like what remains a virtual vaudeville if I just took one little bit of one of the views without the animation of the audience and put it on there. And this was a professional company, so it's still. And then of course the SET project which I love is a whole different kettle of fish. Their goal is precisely, it gives you the interactivity that Dr. Faustus does but without any of the specificity and detail or archival information. I mean, it's a tool. It's a tool for staging things. So it's a whole different project. All right, so that finishes my presentation. So thank you. You have time for a couple of questions? Oh, yeah, absolutely. All right, so please, questions, thoughts, concerns? A comment and then a question. Virtual vaudeville isn't totally dead because I assigned a project to my theater history class to go and find something interesting on the web that they wanted to present. And one of my students stood up and said, I found virtual vaudeville. And I went, I did that face. Enough that he presented on it, I was super excited about it. So it's still. An old widow likes to use it. Woo! So that was very exciting. But I think one of the things that Steven very brought up this morning that I think was really interesting is if you have something public facing, it is for the public. And so it seems to me that the virtual vaudeville project had several different audiences. It had students and teachers, fellow researchers, the researchers themselves, and then even people who stumble on it, like my student. And when you think about virtual vaudeville and if you did it again in a new iteration or continue with it, is there an audience there that was underserved that you would want to push forward? Were there any weaknesses in the way that you approached those audiences? And how would you think about that? Really think about it. Yeah, that's a really, really fantastic question. I mean, well, one thing that I had hoped for early on is it ended up, I think, being something that was useful to lecturers. I think they incorporated it and maybe people would play with it. But it wasn't something, my fantasy was that students would engage with it at Great Lakes and spend all this time. And I think it would have to be truly interactive. And I think if we can really put it in a game engine and have people play with it, then that would make it much, much, and originally the idea within the game engine was that you could literally go inside any audience member and experience it from their perspective and even interact. That's why we hired the AI people because we actually created the, we did the programming for it too. We had a black box AI thing so that you would sit there and you could actually make certain choices and the people around you would respond to what you were doing appropriately depending on who they were. Which sounds really elaborate for just the spectators, but it was for me the most exciting part of the whole thing. And I think if we had that, it would, I hope, open it up to students at all different levels in a whole different kind of way and make it really, really exciting. And give you a little bit of agency. I'll put you really in the play suit so you were just passive. But, and I think for it to serve a scholarly community more, part of it is just more than the one act and having it available, but also to add the ability to update it because right now the way it is, and for collective scholarship as well. But even just the scholars, for us to continue to update it and to get comments. So it was very much a closed system with its notes. So that's something I would change. And I think that would open up much more to scholars. Hi, Yamai. Yeah, I'm interested in how the virtual project generated knowledge from its creation. And I'm wondering about that in two ways. One, I'm wondering about how the act of actually doing the performances, thinking about the acoustics, modeling that acoustic space. In other words, the creation of the theater and the performances. What would be some of the most interesting, coolest knowledge that was generated from about Vaudeville, about this theater that happened in that respect? Right. And secondly, I don't know whether you track this, got comments back, or can just kind of idealistically think about this. What were some of the ways that you could imagine playing in this space generated understanding and learning that was unexpected to you? Playing in the digital space? Yeah, actually playing around that theater, like that people did this and went, oh, you're something that we had noticed before. A lot of those performances are what it was like to be in the audience. Right, yeah. I mean, really a lot of it has to do with the specificity of it. So asking the really, that you have to ask the questions, well, how many audience members would there be in the different areas? And exactly how would they be responding to each specific moment of what's happening? So you can speak in these generalizations. Yeah, there were lots of people and there were Irish people there. But to think, all right, when somebody is actually doing a routine where they're making fun of the Irish guy, and then they're doing the routine where they're making fun of the Jewish guy, and you've got the Irish guy and the Jewish guy sitting next to you. Is the Jewish guy gonna laugh at the Jewish jokes or the Irish jokes? Or are both jokes? And exactly how will that happen? And this is speculative, so it's a creative kind of exploration. We didn't gain any data that could help us answer it, but it forced us to ask those questions in a way that you otherwise wouldn't specifically. And even with the acoustics, what's interesting about the acoustics is then the experience from the different parts of the house. So that if you're sitting in that second balcony, you're gonna be hearing the Irish guy next to you more than you're gonna hear the person on stage. So it's gonna create that community, which totally makes sense. Whereas, if you're in one of the more entitled spaces, you can get closer to being lost in the performance and black out everybody else. And then of course from the second balcony with the African-American audience members just barely being able to hear anything and actually being able to see what you see from that perspective, which I saw recently at Hamilton from the very back of the Fox Theater would have been a very simple thing. It was sort of the little thing moving around and how that's experienced. And whether, what sort of audience you have and why people would even let themselves have that experience, what they were getting out of it. So a lot of it had to do with the questions that it posed and then rather than the answers that it gave us. And but it forced us to have to at least speculate about the answers because we had to decide. So we actually had in the second audience in that part really far away, there was one guy that kept falling asleep because he could barely hear anything. It was like, you can talk. And we did have actually videos of just the different 32 types that you could watch throughout the whole thing. So you get to look and experience that. Kind of figure out how to formulate this question. Thank you first of all, this was really interesting. Just from hearing you talk, there's obviously an attempt at creating authenticity here. It's going to be accurate. It's going to be all these other things, but it also seems like it's an adaptation in another level. Adaptation theory is not my strong suit, but what I've read of it often talks about the struggle for authenticity versus the author or the adapter, POV, right? And it seems like the project's rather perspective was we're looking at these particular questions, we're looking at what's it like to sit next to these different ethnicities. Can you, this is where I have trouble formulating the question. Can you talk about that struggle between wanting to represent the authentic, but also at the same time having certain research questions, certain research agendas that's framing the project. Right, yes. And I think they get back to what I was talking about in terms of the danger to the simulation, is the project, the game that we're playing is striving to recover this past, which we all understand is absolutely impossible and even deeply problematic as a project and we wanted to avoid falling into positivism and any sense that it was conceivably possible, which is why I keep saying the questions are far more important than the answers. So the key thing was to foreground the speculative nature, 90% even here, even going to a period when it's relatively close historically and there is evidence, 99% of what we had is speculative based on this thin scaffolding of information that we're building off of. And the question is how much it's all there. So we emphasize, we highlight all of that, so even the script in the way that's put together, but certainly the performance and the choreographic moves and we had the choreographer write a note about what choices he made, which made it super clear that he was just totally making it up, but based on a couple of lines about how Frank Bush was an eccentric dancer and we know that George M. Cohen was an eccentric dancer and we have more information about how he did it. So it's really, we're putting it all on the table, making it really clear this is 99%. I wouldn't call it adaptation precisely because it's speculation. I'm even veering away from interpretation because it's not that much, it's filling in, it's a performative gesture. And I do, in looking at it, I was struggling with that idea of how much I wanted it to be there, but how much to foreground it, how much to put the frame around it so that you, because part of me actually liked the idea that you could get lost in the simulation and experience it, but you had to know that what you were experiencing was a fiction, wasn't a reality. So playing, and I don't think, to be honest, that virtual vaudeville foregrounded that, particularly for high schools, for scholars, for you guys, wouldn't be a problem, right? But I do worry about if you're an undergrad or a high school student, you're looking at it, it's gonna be wow, now I know exactly what it was like to be in a vaudeville theater and to make it impossible for somebody to experience virtual vaudeville and walk away with that. And I think there are ways to do it. And if I was to do it again, I would think from the ground up about how to create that frame from the very beginning. It seems like you did everything you could to make sure that it was sustainable, but it still kind of fell apart in the end for you. Is the landscape any better right now for sustainability or is it still the same? It's better, but who knows? At the time I thought I was being conscientious. So what I would do now, there are standards now, I wouldn't need shockwave to do anything that I did. I could create certainly the performance viewer pretty easily with HTML5 and Java and sort of existing things. There's nothing there that we need a third-party application for anymore. So the performance, but still even those things, then in 10 years it'll be HTML19 and HTML5 will be broken. So I don't have any great confidence in any of that, which is why I think that underlying idea of keeping the content separate from the structure is important. A challenge there is that, and this might, we might reach a plateau, this isn't an issue. Our expectations for 3D animation have developed so much now. So I mean, if you now, even if you look at a Pixar movie, the things that seemed so amazing 15 years ago now seem sort of tincy. So we tried really hard, actually the versions that you see now, we had different versions you could see. Like a little postage-sized thing for, and then we went up to super high resolution with no computer at the time could run, but we created the movies and had it there. And so now on YouTube, I didn't bother with having the lower ones, it's all the super high resolution. So it lasted a little bit longer because we were thinking ahead and trying to create something that was crazy. I mean, nobody's gonna be able to see this online. And, but still it doesn't look like people are not so used to incredible Pixar kinds of things. It's not that. So for, and particularly for a high school student or, you know, they're gonna look and say, oh, this is sort of a cheesy animation. And so even keeping the content separately, separate doesn't. So it is a problem. But then, you know, to what extent do we go back to a scholarly monograph from 1920, you know, and look at it as anything but evidence of what people were thinking in 1920, right? So to some extent, I think you have to just, you know, 10 years isn't a bad shelf life for a digital project. Yeah. I'm curious about what you used to figure out how to simulate the acoustics of the theater. Was that a digital program? You know, for that, we didn't. We had everything was on a different track. And so we simply, actually in the game engine that we didn't end up using, it was digital because it actually would adjust the, the sound would be located on a source and it would, so, and the people had their sound. So within Gabriel, it was 100% automated. And I think within Unity, it could be 100% automated. But in the movies that we created, it was simply, we figured out where we were and then it was the balance of where the sound was coming from, just like mixed it. But we had every audience group. So the people in the second balcony were in one track and the people in the first part. So we were just playing with those levels depending on where we were. Yeah. A couple projects. So my questions are sort of a really spectacular thing. And I'm still kind of, I'm still putting that in my head, but me based on thinking about the sustainability of digital archives and the problems of historiography in that field, I wonder if the question of the sustainability and updatableness of projects and the interactivity of the wider audience might be related in some way. You know, in the sense that if part of the audience is coders and those people and that there's some sort of commons relationship, then that might be a way of keeping the project alive in a technical updating way that's part of that ongoing conversation for audiences. And I mean, maybe something that we need to think about with these projects in future is how to build in updating as part of the funding because books don't really change once they're built. But, you know, we're used to models where something gets made and then it's made, but in fact, it's part of how you make these things that they need that. So that's one thought. And then another thing that occurs to me is that because it's so overwhelmingly persuasive to watch the flow of visual images, you know, that even, I think, you know, an interesting question is how to interrupt that other than by means of commentary that you can click on. You know, you're talking about audiences that perhaps aren't so much trained to do that. And I wonder if there are modes inside of the fictive dream of that flow to do that. For example, with that face question, you know, I mean, I totally understand the argument about way and practice. It was too hard to go there, but I have two thoughts about that. And one is if you build a project like this, whether you can engage from the beginning, interested in invested African American scholars who really wanted to be part of problematized and theorize that, because it's so much part of that shared history, you know. And that's so rich. And the other is, I wonder if there's a way to visually interrupt that smooth flow of the fictive image just to make it appear as a problem. You know, so that within the performance, there's maybe this historical picture from a newspaper or a blackface performance that just occurs as a glitch and then a little, like, you know, a slashed out sign saying, why would we go there? Right. And because there's something about immersion that is hard to break by, well, I mean, you see what I'm saying, don't you? Absolutely, 100%. Anyway, I'm just sort of thinking out loud about something. No, I think you're absolutely right. And that's what we were thinking. I mean, with the blackface, we were thinking we would actually need to engage the right people to be around and come up with those threats. There's no way that we could do this unmediated. But it raises that issue. I don't think it's appropriate here either. And there are, I think there are ways, like there was the little note boxes that comes up. There could be the frame that you're seeing and then the commentary around it. So that could help as well. Rather than just the notes, there could be questions posed or challenges made or alternatives or things. There's a whole other way of thinking about it. Or we weren't sure about this part, or, you know, click here for another visualization of the same moment, something like that. Well, just like something about putting in this frozen historical image. That too, exactly. Because there's a translation process from those frozen historical images to the moving immersive thing that is embedded in the whole project. So to sort of reflect a source that then couldn't move. Right. You know, might be kind of interesting. Yep. All right, so we should move on to Sarah's presentation. Thank you, David. That was awesome. Thank you. So I am keenly aware that we are three and a half hours in on the morning and about, you know, 35 minutes from lunch. So I think rather than sort of offering any kind of real lecture, what I'd like to do in this space is give us a little bit of, let me see, just let's get this set up. What I'd like to, is it coming? Do I have to do something tricky, David? Ah, let's see. What's the kind of work from the screen of your screen? Maybe this will work better. Oh, if you have a screen on, yeah. Sometimes if you just go out of it again, could you? That is me, but I can't see me here. Maybe it won't, hang on a second. Maybe it won't, it might not let me, been more of an issue. Let's try this. There we go. Rather than present any kind of real lecture, what I'd like to do is maybe offer some comments and some synthesizing ideas that we can then use to kind of bridge this morning's presentations to this afternoon's presentations and really to think about how to set up a framework for discussion and interaction tomorrow, does that make sense? And so the thing I'd like to, and I have this up here in case I wanna play with some, show you some images, but I'll be pretty brief, maybe like 15, 20 minutes now, and then we can have some further discussion and read this. A lot of the times when I talk or when I hear or when there are discussions around DH, but particularly with people who haven't done this kind of work in the past or are thinking about getting into it, very often there is this perceived barrier to entry, right? And it's often a barrier of skills. It's sometimes a very real barrier of resources. It's a very real barrier of time, right? So not just like money and equipment but time and particularly with one of the things that I think as a field that we struggle with is that the people by and large who are most interested in doing this kind of work are people who are graduate students and early career professionals, who are the people who have the most to lose by using their time badly, right? And that the gatekeepers, right? The people like me, right? Who write tenure reviews and who write manuscript and project reviews tend overwhelmingly not to be well versed in this material. It's not what generally we were trained in and we may be opposed or anxious about it for a whole bunch of other reasons, right? So you hit this kind of critical tension I think early in your career where you're like, do I invest in this, right? Which if I'm really gonna learn a different programming language or a new way of working, am I gonna sacrifice really much needed time and energy towards what's gonna get me tenure? And by the time I reach that point, where am I gonna be? And what's the university asking for me? And there are different kinds of pressures depending on where we're at. So what I'd like to do is without ignoring that is also to point out, and maybe this has already occurred to you, the ways in which the things that you are already trained in are useful in this field. And I'm gonna go back to Steve Barry's presentation from this morning and just ask that we kind of rethink and I'm just reading from my notes that I took during his presentation, right? And the things that he highlighted as things you're gonna need to learn how to do and steps you're gonna need to take in building, right? A digital humanities archeogram, is that what he called it? Archeograph, not an anti-project, right? The first, and I think, you know, David's project highlights this also is you need to learn how to build a collaborative team, right? Theater, check, right? It helps to cultivate obsessions and people who are willing to be obsessive about something with you. Theater, check, right? You need to have some kind of awareness, appreciation, understanding of an outreach to audiences. Theater, check. You need to understand your work and frame your work as an iterative process that it does not happen spontaneously and come into full being in one go round. You need to, dare I say, rehearse it, check. Later in his talk, Steve was talking about the idea that the digital humanities is kind of taking hold right now in part because educational institutions are recognizing that the labor market no longer needs people who can read, write and do arithmetic and sit down and shut up, but needs people who can create and people who can, just going back to the beginning, build collaborative teams, foster and direct their obsessions, understand audiences and understand and create work as an iterative process, right? So the idea of building and creation as being an essential part of pedagogy and education, right? Theater, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. The emphasis on design, right? Is a big one? Knowing that the languages that you are using to communicate ideas are not purely semantic, right? But that they are working in concert with other kinds of languages and semiotic systems, whether that's image, movement, sound, gesture, bodies, position, location, mapping, right? I mean, there's a whole history of cartography as, and if you watch, right, that in animation, right, is data made live? Whether or not we think the concept of liveness is overrated. That's from our morning exercise for those of you following along at home. I was also really struck and listening to this, the idea that one needs to cultivate with relationships outside the institution and outside the field that when we're creating public facing work, there has to be an integration with people who have access to and have already cultivated different kinds of communication with different kinds of publics. So the press, and Steve talked a lot about like university presses as being a location for that and many of them are starting to turn towards different kinds of alternative publishing and scholarship. It's coming right now, mostly in the form of companion websites. So this idea of projects and artifacts that are going alongside existing scholarship, I think Steve called it an inflection point. I would call it a tipping point. I think we're gonna get to a moment of equilibrium, right? Where the expectation is that everybody does have a kind of digital or media artifact that goes with a publication and then maybe to the point where the publication at some point becomes secondary even to the artifact. Publicity being really important in this aspect but also then coming around and this is I think something that David and Steve both emphasize is the notion that the digital culture is in large part also saturated with ephemerality. That many of these things are not sustainable. But as I listen to them, partly I always like, I kind of chuckle, right? Because it's like, yeah, well my productions from 10 years ago weren't sustainable either, right? And sometimes they weren't sustainable past like, the three shows that we did at the college, right? And somehow that's been totally okay with us, right? Ambo Guard, hold on tightly, let go lightly, right? Like is that not the exercise of theater, right? You invest a ton of resources, time, money, energy in something that you know has a limited lifespan and then you kind of let it go and you have a cast party and everybody gets drunk and goes home, right? So there's a sense in which the rhythms of the digital and also then studying the field of digital culture and this notion of obsolescence and ephemerality and loss that those of us who study performance, right? Are uniquely I would say positioned to appreciate, to understand and to analyze. Like if you go to the theater and you write theater criticism, if you go to dance and you write dance criticism, if you talk about performance that you don't expect to get to see again, right? You have a whole vocabulary and a language and a methodology for documenting, analyzing and disseminating, this is like my big thing, right? Something that you know your audience is not gonna see in the form that you understood it, right? And that they're not going to expect to. When I read theater criticism from the 1960s, I'm totally content that I didn't get to see that. I was not alive, right? And I don't expect to be alive. That's a weird sentence, but you know what I mean, right? And the last aspect that really comes out that I think we are really uniquely equipped to do and deal with is this question of failure. And I don't think that we tout often and loudly enough and I think this is again a responsibility of those of us who are more senior in the field and have the advantages and protections of tenure to talk about the way in which we learn a lot through experimentation and failure. And weirdly, the science is they have cultures of failure, right? They have literature of failure. I mean, they also have like literatures of covering up failure, that's not to, you know, like not to idealize what's happening in the sciences or social sciences. But like we really, but this is in the humanities and sometimes in the arts, like we loudly proclaim our successes and we bury our failures, right? And the things that didn't work out. But in doing so, we also dismiss and obscure the things that we learned from them. And I think the engagement with digital technologies is, you know, I used to have a joke with a computer scientist that I worked with quite a bit when I was at the University of Buffalo, Debbie Burhan, she's at a Kenesha's college. And the joke was that there's no crying in computer science. But that's a joke because like there's so much crying in computer science, right? I mean, like few things are more frustrating than spending eight to nine hours trying to code something that seems so close and unable to find like the bug that will unlock it. And so this idea of, but that's where you learn, right? And we do that all the time. So my sort of big takeaway from all of this and perhaps I'd belabor the point too much is that we already in theater and performance studies have a lot of the tools to make use of digital technologies and to embrace the digital humanities. So regardless of your specific comfort or understanding or knowledge base, I encourage you to remember and to think about what you already have and the skills and the tools that you've already cultivated and to recognize and acknowledge for yourself as well as for others that these are valuable here and they have a role to play. The other thing I wanted to talk about and this will be like the five to 10 minute version of what is a longer paper and presentation is to talk just a little bit about my own scholarly approach to this work which is kind of the flip side of Steve or maybe an interesting kind of third angle on this from Steve and David's work. Which is to take the methodologies of theater and performance studies and apply them to digital culture in the way we understand that. And so I'm currently working on a book which is called Digital Historiography and Performance and it's a fairly, I mean it's not comprehensive but it's a kind of overview attempt to understand what are the relations between and among digital culture, history and historiography and performance. Because one of the other things and it came out a lot in Steve's talk this morning like towards the end, in fact I think I wrote down, where did I write it down? Where he starts talking about the ways in which these projects and this public also then becomes performative, right? That we're watching these works perform and so the sort of three domains that I've been most interested in is thinking about what is digital history? And so the three areas of the book are digital history of performance. So how digital technologies help us document, analyze and disseminate theater performance history, right? So what happens to theater history when we have video archives that we can draw upon? How do we understand the role of the camera in capturing different kinds of performances? How do we problematize and critique that? Without just simply naturalizing and reifying the camera's view as an all seeing, right? I, the second is the digital history in performance and looking at mostly contemporary performers and artists who are looking at current events but also history and are using digital technologies and performance techniques in order to document what's happening in the world right now that are then becoming a new kind from to my mind of historical artifact, right? That, and I would draw particular attention to the migrant crisis that's happening in Europe with the work of Therese Verhoeven, the Dutch artist, but also in terms of broader and slightly more esoteric approaches to what's dangerous in digital culture of somebody like the Belgian performer Christopher Donk or in Robbie Moorwee, right? Who has talked a lot about, right? His role as a Lebanese artist and the circulation, right? In the Middle East of digital media performance, violence, war and exploitation, right? So that's sort of the second part of the project. And then the third part of the project, and this is what I can talk more about in other settings when you have a little more bandwidth. This is a couple of different images from Verhoeven and Moorwee is to talk about that third, which is digital history as performance and the sort of fundamental argument that I make here and I've written about this a little bit in the article that circulated, I think for either this afternoon or tomorrow, but the question of that digital technologies, right? Perhaps even ironically for those of us who engage with the whole likeness debate is that the more we engage with digital technologies, the more we approach the conditions of theater. And so ostensibly what seems on one level to be taking us further away from co-presence and in embodied form and the sense of liveness actually then begins to replicate and look like theater. And so I've been really interested in museums and cultural sites that use digital technologies in ways that begin to theatricalize their collections and to create performance opportunities for their visitors, right? So the piece that got me thinking about this a lot is the Decision Point Theater at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas, Texas. There was an aster there one year and when everybody else went to the JFK Books Depository, I couldn't get a single person to go to the Bush Museum. I had a theater conference and it was amazing. It is an amazing, if you have the opportunity to go to Dallas and go to the George W. Bush Library and to go sit and play for a few hours in the Decision Point Theater, I highly, highly recommend it. It's an amazing experience. It is a role playing game, but it is entirely digital and you sit in a little kiosk. There's a whole series, right? So you are lined up like an audience in front of this curved screen and you go through four key Decision Points in the George W. Bush Presidency and you watch a combination of archival footage and recreated advisors, right? Who were sort of filmed like an industrial, like a corporate industrial film about how you're gonna make this decision and then you vote about whether you agree or disagree. I mean, it's absolutely wild and fantastic and I highly recommend it. And when I did this and I'm like, wow, I mean, I was not expecting it first of all. The museum had actually only been open for six or seven months when I was there and it totally blew my mind. And then all of a sudden, you know, it's like when somebody says like green car and all of a sudden all you see are green cars, right? All I see now are museums filled with digital content and theaters, right? So then I was in London and as part of the Imperial War Museum, it actually has a number of different kiosks and ways that you can engage with it that foster this kind of historical understanding through digital methods, right? So this is the naval strategy game in which you try to pick formations for cargo ships that will protect the most cargo crossing the English Channel. And I played it over and over and over and over again and Commander is as high as I got. And I found it really upsetting because every single time you just like, you watch your cargo ships like sink and die. And there's a level of frustration there but you are also surrounded because of the context because this isn't just a video game. The context is artifacts and physical objects of people who died doing this. And so every time I lost cargo ships, I lost people. I found it really deeply distressing. And I was struck, I remember this slide in my presentation when I was listening to Steve, right? And I think he had this one great quote and I'm so sorry that I'm probably gonna mingle it or forget it, but he basically talks about that what prompted him to do this kind of work and to embrace the digital was his desire to reproduce that feeling, right? In other words, he had an affective visceral response to the history, to the information, to the records and that he is trying to recreate a similar kind of emotional response in his audience. Theater, right? Performance. And I find it amazing that after so much dismissal, right, and I'm not just talking contemporary but like historical dismissal of the hysterical and the over-emotional and the unscientific, right, of the theater dramatic and performance arts that we are now actually turning precisely to those because it is the affect, right? The sort of missing affect in digital culture. And so again, I think as theater people, as performance people, as dance people, I think we have something to contribute to this really very vital to contribute to this discussion. Another museum I went to is the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, which was redone not very long ago and very much in the spirit of the George W. Bush Museum. So again, these interactive kiosks and in many ways, right? I mean, Susan Bennett has written about this like theater and museums, right? Museums are always kind of theatricalized, dramatic spaces. It's really interesting to compare them to Ikea, right? Which also has these kinds of staged events and there's a similar kind of mobility and in both cases, like you exit past the cashiers. But this one is really striking in that for most of the presidency, the Johnson presidency, it's everything is blue, right? The walls are blue and they're kind of soothing and he's amazing and you're just listening to all the Civil Rights Act and more on poverty and you pick up these historical phones, right? I eat props as you go through and you really participate and you're listening to audio recordings and then you turn the corner in Vietnam and it's like red, right? The walls are red and the whole thing just gets incredibly dark and oppressive and intense and it's there that you then play through these kind of game trees, right? These decision trees where you examine evidence and listen to audio recordings of telephone calls and things like this and then you like in the Decision Point Theater, you vote. What's interesting here is it's still individual, right? The Bush is really remarkable because it's done as a collective and at the end of every iteration of the Bush experience there's always this moment of this time the audience voted to and it presents whatever option President Bush did and then it gives you his and then he comes out in a video and explains why he made the decision he made. Really kind of wild. There's a little bit of this also. I thought it would be more but it wasn't at the Richard N. Nixon Library but really one of the most interesting things about the Nixon Library other than my commemorative Christmas ornament that I got because I was seeing it over the holidays last December which of course has a place proudly on my tree is this like warning to the video game players which right is a kind of coded like Pokemon Go like please don't play Pokemon Go on top of the grace. And in fact you're seeing these warnings at a lot of cultural sites because Google Earth kind of mapped them more or less randomly in some ways but playing I mean there's a whole bunch of debates about how they did that and following certain kinds of guidelines but it has taken players to sites of a better considered right sacred or should be treated with some kind of with respect and so there's this kind of announcement to the sort of Pokemon Go. I also had the experience of so I went to Warsaw and I'll talk a little bit about that more later to look at the POLIN Museum and the history for the history of Polish Jews which is an almost entirely digital media museum due to the absence of physical artifacts. But while I was there I also had the opportunity to play the history of Warsaw the city of Warsaw as a virtual reality game. That is me. Unfortunately I could tell you very little about the history of Warsaw because as I am getting an audio accounting of the history of Warsaw my actual actions involved using various kinds of I would assume historically accurate weapons to arbitrarily destroy random things that are being pointed at me. So here I am in I believe the medieval period and I have a sword and I am slicing fruit and vegetables that are flying at me out of a basket. So I can't really tell you very much of what was happening in this moment and another I was firing a bow and during the Second World War I had a machine gun that I used to shoot beer bottles. Again, I can't really tell you very much else of what was happening in Warsaw during those respective periods. Other than beware of the flying fruits and beer bottles are the enemy. It also had the unfortunate effect of bringing on a food poisoning but that's another story. This is going back into the Imperial War Museum in London and was a revisioning and a renovation of what's called the trench experience which used to be entirely physical and now is a combined physical and digital experience. So you go into a physical trench that has been built and you see these shadows. So in the left hand picture you have these shadows that are ostensibly silhouettes of people alongside you in the trench. So it's this idea of a kind of physically immersive experience but as you look down other trenches what you see are digital photographs and videos. So it becomes this kind of hybrid or mixed reality space that I would say becomes a really critical moment. Did you have a question? Yes. Yes, and the sounds, right? I don't have recorded audio but there are the sounds of machine guns and bombs and the kind of, you know, but for me of course and I'm not a World War II historian you know, it sounds like a movie and I don't know if that's because the movies have been getting it really right all these years, right? So there's like the you know kind of thing and there is a big physical plane, right? That sits I think rather non-historically accurately at scale above the trench but I also don't know that if I were to hear a historically accurate recording I would understand it as authentic because I've been raised and because my knowledge of this period overwhelmingly comes from other kinds of media. So I think the question about adaptation and authenticity and what we treat as authentic or what we recognize as an adaptation is very much conditioned by all the media that we've already seen. So okay, I'm gonna just skip ahead to if I can, okay this is where I talk about virtual we don't need to do all that but this is the sort of the final thing I'll say just a couple of things here about and I'm happy to talk about this more. What brought me to Warsaw was the POLIN Museum for the history of Polish Jews who's one of the kind of key advisors and curators is Barbara Kirsch of Black Imlet, right? Museum and Performance Studies Scholar at NYU. She is now I believe like the head the executive director for the permanent collection and this is really a remarkable exhibit. Bryce Lees has written about this in a recent issue of Theater Journal. He talks predominantly about the building and its site where it's cited in Warsaw in relation to the Warsaw ghetto and again the lack of physical historical objects and locations and the space of the museum and it's one of the few museums whose entire permanent collection is underground. So it's a completely, not unlike the room we've been in for the last almost four hours, completely synthetic environment, right? So the lighting is all completely controlled but also IE theater. This is the opening, this is the forest. Polin is the word for rest, which is a bit ironic because I spent eight straight hours in this museum and I still felt like I rushed through the end of it. I totally should have built in more day. But this is the sort of opening but the exhibits themselves and I'm not gonna say too much about them are rendered overwhelmingly as digital displays. So this is a, this is you can talk, play this game about merchant trade. This is right at the beginning. One of the more famous is this is the Jewish street. This is another part of the museum. What I find really compelling and intriguing about this space is that it is a physically structured facade, right? So like all of the sort of detailing is three-dimensional but all of the imagery is projected. Which particularly in such a confined space and for those of you who have ever played around with short-throw projectors, unbelievably difficult to do, right? Much simpler to paint it, right? Which raises the whole question of why is this a digital projection? I have some thoughts about that. The ubiquity of interactive displays is so great that sometimes they're just lit displays and they have to tell you that they won't do anything. So this is not an uncommon, like it's like nope, you can't touch this one. It doesn't do anything. And you still will see people being like. Okay. But the whole spaces is this way. This is a Jewish cemetery relatively early in the exhibit. I think I have a little bit of video, maybe, no? And you literally play historian here, right? So you go to the graveyard and you put your paper over the stone and then you do a rubbing. And then you translate it. So there are more images that I can talk about. One of the things that I found quite profound in all of these, however, is, and what I am sort of thinking about and thinking through is how these works in these spaces work as theater, how theater can help us understand the function of digital technologies in these spaces, what this might tell us about our own attempts to do DH and how we engage elements of the immersive, the interactive and the performative, what kind of models they present to us. And again, the polline is a really interesting example because of its negotiation between reconstructions, recreations and digital play. So there are also physical objects that have the kind of status of props. So this is an anti-Semitic book, but only about six pages actually are operable, right? The rest of it is just a solid object that is linked there. Again, games, this is a game of after partition, right? Which empire you can get into. And significantly, I got to live in the Austrian Empire. I never made it into Russia, right? I played like for 45 minutes and I could not figure out the combination of answers that would get me into Russia, which raises the whole question is, does anybody get into Russia, right? Which again, takes us back to a very particular kind of historical moment in the late 18th century. But yes, this kind of idea of being really saturated with these images, but also opportunities for reconstruction and reenactment throughout. I'm just gonna sort of skip ahead. As well as the presentation of documents, one of the few displays of historical documents, all of which are replicas, by the way. None of these are the authentic object, although they are all more or less treated as if to perform the role of authentic object, including the sort of notion of, these are all from the German archive, right? So the German archive very carefully collected, very carefully maintained, survived the war. But we get this kind of intersection, really interesting intersection between digital representation, physical representation, and then digital representation of the physical representation. So on the left is a physical replica of the actual right folder binder sheet, including the little torn details. And on the right is the digital version of that sheet, but weirdly like the tears are not quite the same, right? So now it's kind of like, well, what is it modeled on? And what is the status of this? Is it a historical artifact, prop, reenactment? How do we understand that kind of negotiation? So these are some of the things that I think that digital history and digital historiography raises for us. I also think they are opportunities for those of us who are theater and performance scholars to enter into conversations about this. And again, I'll just close by saying, trust your own skills and your own instincts and your own knowledge. You have a lot to offer this field. And I look forward to our conversations and what we learned this afternoon and tomorrow as well. That's all I have for now. And I think it is time for lunch. So there you go. Thank you. Thank you so much, sir. My pleasure. My pleasure. My pleasure. My pleasure. My pleasure. My pleasure. My pleasure.