Digital Dance Archives

Background

The one-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project investigated how to link together and search across different archive collections with the resultant website acting as a portal to explore the integrated collections. This was carried out by academics and archive staff at the University of Surrey and Coventry University. The project team at Surrey were from the dance, film and theatre department, the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) and the National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD).

Due to the short timescale and technical ambitiousness of the project, specific collections were chosen for their broad historical and stylistic range and for their visual interest.

Outputs

A website was created, content of which included photographs, drawings and moving images drawn from the Siobhan Davies Replay digital archive, hosted by Coventry University, and from NRCD archives including extemporary dance theatre, Rudolf Laban, natural movement, revived Greek dance and Ludmilla Mlada.

Visitors to the website could:

• Explore the digital archive materials
• Select and compile items into personally created virtual scrapbooks
• Tag and share content
• Play and annotate video
• Search for visual similarity such as colour and ‘posture’ (shape).