The DARIAH Working Group Theatralia was formally established in 2021 within DARIAH-ERIC to address the growing digital transformation of the performing arts1. Bringing together around 30 scholars, GLAM professionals, and artists, the group fosters interdisciplinary research on digitization, digital performance, digital methodologies, and archiving in the performing arts. After an initial phase2 dedicated to identifying the new challenges and emerging needs raised by the performing arts’ adaptation to the digital turn, the group underscored a key epistemological issue: the need for a shared computational language to describe and represent the field, enabling meaningful data exchange and generating real scholarly value. In its second phase, Theatralia therefore refocused its efforts on refining such digital description models and supporting their integration into broader archival infrastructures.
One of the first issues identified was the need to develop a descriptive language for performing-arts documentation, especially archival materials. Discussions showed that in many countries, including Croatia, the task of archiving such materials falls largely to theatre scholars and practitioners rather than trained archivists or information specialists. Because those documenting performances often lack formal training in metadata design, it became crucial to identify a model that is both comprehensive and accessible to humanists working in theatre research and documentation. Building on these insights, Theatralia adopted Dublin Core as the foundation for developing metadata schemas and controlled vocabularies for the performing arts. Its simplicity and flexibility made it especially suitable for scholars and theatre professionals without formal training in information science.
The archival description language developed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), (which issued its first model some thirty years ago) offers a key advantage: it provides a simple yet effective set of metadata fields suitable for any type of archive. The “unqualified” Dublin Core (Dublin Core Metadata Element Set) consists of 15 standardized fields – including contributor, coverage, creator, date, description, format, identifier, language, publisher, relation, rights, source, subject, title, and type – forming a basic framework for resource description.
Over the past two decades, DCMI has expanded this model with “Qualified Dublin Core” (DCTERMS), which adds more specific elements and refinements. This flexibility is particularly useful for performing arts archives, whose materials are highly heterogeneous, ranging from documents and physical artifacts to digital assets such as audio recordings and lighting files.
In response to these needs, Theatralia has developed a tailored metadata set for performing arts archives. The resulting framework, designed for use by private theatres, independent artists, and researchers, has retained 38 metadata fields that capture the complexity of performing arts archival materials. A user is not required to fill in all 38 metadata fields and can select only those most relevant to their project.
For each metadata field, domain-specific definitions have been developed with recommendations for relevant standards such as ISO norms3, thesauri, ontologies, and concrete examples from performing arts archives. An example of one such term, medium, is below.
Medium | |
Definition | The material or physical carrier of the resource |
Contextual definition | In the context of performing arts, the Dublin Core field ‘Medium’ refers to the type of material that constitutes the described resource when it has a material composition. This can include physical elements such as costumes, stage props, set designs, film reels, musical instruments, printed scores, paper, canvas, or other tangible materials used in the creation of the resource. Unlike ‘Format’, which describes the technical specifications or digital encoding of the resource (e.g., ‘video/mp4’ for a performance recording or ‘application/pdf’ for a digital script), ‘Medium’ specifically identifies the material composition of the resource itself when it is a physical or tangible material. |
Règle d’écriture | Multiple related versions should be separated by a semicolon ( ; ). |
Example(s) 1 (play) | typed script; paper; softcover |
Example(s) 2 (dance show) | Video |
Example(s) 3 (performance) | Photo |
example 4 (stage costumes) | Costume |
The Dublin Core for Performing Arts (DCPA) developed by Theatralia is available online via HAL, the French open-access platform that allows researchers to deposit and freely share their scholarly publications. It is published in a reusable and user-friendly format, for example, a CSV spreadsheet that users can populate with metadata for their resources.
By using this model to describe performing-arts archival data, users can organize their resources according to Dublin Core fields, enabling their integration into digital environments where they become findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable in accordance with FAIR principles. Indeed, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is guided by a commitment to interoperability and data dissemination, particularly within RDF (Resource Description Framework)-based environments. Several elements can be aligned with international standards such the W3C Note on Date and Time Formats [W3CDTF] or the Extended Date/Time Format Specification [EDTF], and with controlled vocabularies to enhance precision – evident in fields like Coverage, where using resources such as the Getty TGN is recommended.
Since no dedicated thesaurus exists for the performing arts, developing a standardized vocabulary has become essential, forming the second major task undertaken by the Working Group.
To embark on the task of building a taxonomy for the performing arts, in 2024 Theatralia conducted a state-of-the-art review on controlled vocabularies and on freely accessible tools available for their development. This review showed that constructing a thesaurus remains, to date, the most practical and suitable approach for initiating the digital description of a knowledge domain. On the one hand, a thesaurus functions as an online dictionary, with terms organized alphabetically, enriched with definitions and related concepts, and also structured hierarchically (for example, a theatre is a type of conventional venue where a performance takes place; theatre is therefore hierarchically dependent on conventional venue). On the other hand, building a thesaurus is now greatly facilitated by the open-source software Opentheso4, which is intuitive and easy to use, with regular maintenance and robust hosting ensured by the servers of HumaNum, the French national research infrastructure for digital humanities data services. OpenTheso also enables collaborative and multilingual work, and structures data in an interoperable format by assigning persistent identifiers and ensuring compliance with ISO standards and the RDF model.
The state-of-the-art review conducted by the working group also examined existing glossaries, dictionaries, and taxonomies in the performing arts, whether published in traditional print formats or available digitally. A few initiatives currently aim to create online performing-arts dictionaries like the project developed by the American Association of Community Theatre (AACT: https://aact.org/theatre-terms) and the Theatre Development Fund’s initiative (TDF: https://www.tdf.org/on-stage/theatre-dictionary/), which uses short videos to explain theatrical vocabulary. In the French-speaking world, an important reference work is the Dictionnaire du théâtre, created in 1987 by internationally recognized performing-arts scholar Patrice Pavis and reissued multiple times up to 20225; he has also authored a dictionary of contemporary theatre and performance6. After collecting data mainly from these initiatives, the working group performed extraction, normalization, and bibliographic referencing before integrating approximately 1,400 terms into OpenTheso.
Among these, around 100 entries already include fully developed definitions, specifically contextualized for performing-arts archiving and research, providing a robust foundation for the thesaurus. The work was also carried out in partnership with the Institut des Amériques, funded by the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in France, which decided to co-finance the project7 so that the thesaurus would be produced in a multilingual version and also incorporate the fruitful theories developed on the American continent in performance studies (Richard Schechner, Josette Féral, Jorge Dubatti among others theorists that contributed to the development of the field).
A first version of this thesaurus is also available online on HAL in PDF format: https://hal.science/halshs-05156229v1.
The construction of this thesaurus is truly a work in progress, insofar as the 1,300 additional terms entered into the database following the data collection will need to be analyzed. This is what the working group plans to undertake in moving forward. Other translations will also need to be incorporated, including from European languages such as Croatian, in order to reflect both European multilingualism and the cultural diversity of our continent. This translation work has also been providing an opportunity to train students in digital humanities research by hiring them as interns to explore possible translations and their integration into the dedicated tool, OpenTheso. Thus, Theatralia is also engaged in a process of research-led training.
Another issue to be addressed in the next phase is how this thesaurus could be made accessible to humanities researchers who are interested in digital humanities but have limited digital skills. Indeed, most existing controlled vocabularies or standards are available through digital interfaces that are human-readable but not very user-friendly: for example, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative website or the DRAMMAR drama ontology website. For a thesaurus built on OpenTheso, consultation is still possible and relatively user-friendly, allowing easy interaction within the same platform, but OpenTheso does not provide a dedicated interface specifically designed for consultation. This is an issue that requires further exploration and analysis, also in comparison with other initiatives such as the Croatian DARIAH-HR platform, tezaurus.hr.
This question also needs to be examined in the context of the open science principles promoted by the European Union in research. In this sense, the participation of Theatralia in the OSCARS cluster (OSCARS is a European project promoting open science across research infrastructures) is crucial for exploring this issue within an open-access framework. Indeed, Theatralia is involved in the OASIS project led by Pr. Laurent Tessier (Institut Catholique de Paris) and co-chaired by Michaël Bourgatte (Université de Lorraine), which promotes Open Science methodologies and supports the development of innovative tools for video-based research, ultimately enriching the research landscape.
In this context, the work conducted by Theatralia is particularly valuable for exploring the integration of standards into digital tools dedicated to performing arts research. Recently, their collaborative work led to a workshop at the 5th DARIAH-HR international conference Digital Humanities & Heritage in Osijek (Croatia), where a training session was held on e-spect@tor, a video annotation application for performing arts analysis.
The relevance of integrating controlled vocabularies in this field was then explored and discussed, based on the ontology already implemented in the e-spect@tor tool, which allows users to categorize annotations according to the show’s components and their own reactions, such as judgments or emotions, recorded via emoticons. Thus, this type of workshops aimed to evaluate the potential of these vocabularies within a tool-based research approach in performing arts analysis.
Hosted on Huma-Num servers, e-spect@tor8 is an open-access tool available in different languages (english, french, spanish and indonesian): https://especellu.huma-num.fr/. Theatralia will continue working on all the previously mentioned activities with the aim of preparing a future application for a larger-scale project, such as Horizon Europe. Those interested in participating in the work of Theatralia may contact theatralia@dariah.eu.
