Digital Scholarship Roundtable: The State of the Field

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• Digital Scholarship Roundtable: The State of the Field
• Sissi Liu, Derek Miller, Erin B Mee, Kate Elswit, and Sarah Bay-Cheng

In the seventy-fifth anniversary issue of Theatre Journal, former editor Joanne Tompkins in her essay “The Digital Turn: Research and Publishing in Theatre Journal” presents a grippingly thorough historization of the launch of the journal’s online platform in 2016, a key milestone in its development. She describes the initial plans for the online platform in what she calls a “two-part structure” that “presents the most straightforward narrative”: “essays that focus on theatre that is about or incorporates digital practices in the first instance, and essays on theatre that deploy digital methodologies as part of the structure of their critical endeavors.”¹ However, she also states that for theatre and performance practice and research more generally, “it does need to be [more] complicated” than the two-parter.² In response to Tompkins’s article and to the digital turn in theatre and performance in general, Sissi Liu, current chair of ATHE-ASTR Excellence in Digital Scholarship Award Committee, has invited prominent scholars and former chairs/committee members to reflect together on the state of the field of digital scholarship in theatre and performance. Each contributor addresses a complicated issue or takes on a series of productive questions: What kinds of digital scholarship are currently out there and how do we conceptualize them (Liu)? What questions might we ask to assess the current state of digital scholarship (Derek Miller)? Why should we all write/perform born-digital articles and how do we do so (Erin B Mee)? When is a widespread shift coming for digital methods in theatre, dance, and performance (Kate Elswit)? The roundtable concludes with an overview of how digital scholarship across the field in the past twenty-five years has shifted and evolved from digitalization to datafication (Sarah Bay-Cheng). Together, these contributions offer perspectives on what the field looks like now and where it is going.

A Taxonomy of Digital Scholarship Sissi Liu

Digital: using computer technology to generate, store, and process data; the opposite of analog. Scholarship: the production of new knowledge. When the two combine, the result is much larger than the sum of its parts, promising endless possibilities. Digital scholarship in theatre and performance studies has been growing since the early 2000s (see Sarah Bay-Cheng’s reflections below), and especially since 2015, when several theatre journals launched online sections and ATHE and ASTR together established the Excellence in Digital Scholarship Award. Since the COVID-19 global pandemic [End Page E-17] began in 2020, high demand in online platforms and new technologies has spurred a further proliferation of many forms of digital scholarship for a larger audience. As the shape of digital scholarship constantly evolves, an up-to-date taxonomy is needed to help conceptualize its many forms to navigate through the flux and to offer a key to understanding the state of the field.

Having served on the ATHE-ASTR Excellence in Digital Scholarship Award Committee for the past four years, I observe four fluid and intertwined categories of digital scholarship at present and in the foreseeable future: the disseminating, the searchable, the analytical, and the performative (fig. 1).³ The disseminating—a mostly non-data-centric category (where data assists the argument but is not the center of scholarly concern)—documents and shares information in the form of digital publishing; it is the closest to traditional scholarship, preserving its merits while generating new modes of scholarship in a digitized environment. The searchable comprises digital archives and databases, many of which start from manually digitizing, cataloging, and transforming print materials into datasets. The analytical, a data-centric category (in which both the form and content of the project centers on data), presents analyzed or processed data rather than raw data, using digital methodology and data science approaches. The performative, either data-centric or not, “performs” data with an emphasis on user experience and leans toward a creative performative project. Such categorization considers ways of treating data (raw, processed, or performed, each more technologically demanding than the one before) and the relations among scholars/creators and their readers/audience.

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