This two-day workshop will explore the implications of digital documentation for the area of arts, humanities, and cultural heritage. As Michael Brown writes, the ‘information society’ ‘has proven adept at stripping information from the cultural contexts that give it meaning’ (2005). Digitization seems inevitable for the preservation and circulation of arts and heritage, but how might we shape that process to acknowledge local contexts of obligation and reciprocation?

Workshop participants will present pre-circulated papers with a focus on three key issues: the creation and transmission of embodied and collaboratively produced knowledge; the political, social, and ownership effects of digitisation on these arts and knowledge forms, and the potential for drawing on the principles of sharing, obligation, recognition and inclusion within contemporary dance to formulate novel approaches to supplement standard intellectual and cultural property norms and precedents. By drawing on an engagement with contemporary dance and the creative and knowledge transmission processes in that field, we will explore the scope for the adaptation of the assumptions and social principles that work in motivating and structuring dance creation, and how these might be realised in new digital contexts. Five of the eight contributions draw on contemporary dance and its digitisation directly, while the other two pre-circulated papers are focussed on the digitisation of heritage, and the complex and multi layered interests and connections to knowledge that must be taken into account in making digital records out of collaborative and embodied knowledge.

Program: presenters will speak to their pre-circulated papers for 15 minutes followed by 30 minutes of discussion and feedback. Generous time for general discussion and collaboration is scheduled.

Thursday 21^st February, Andrews Room, SSH

2–2:45pm: Introduction. Digital documentation of collaborative and embodied knowledge forms in the arts, museums, and humanities. Lissant Bolton (British Museum) and James Leach (CNRS).

2:45–3:30pm: Gifting Dance: Sharing, Circulation and the Commons in Contemporary Dance. Hetty Blades (Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University)

3:30–4pm. Break

4–4:45pm: Making something together. Siobhan Davies CBE (Artistic Director, Siobhan Davies Dance, and C-Dare, Coventry University) and James Leach (Social Anthropology, CNRS).

4:45-5:15pm Discussion – Mario Biagioli

Friday 22^nd February, Art Annex, Room 107

9:30-10:15am: Annotation as practice, products of annotation and coding schemes. Scott deLahunta. Motion Bank, U of Mainz.

10:15–11:00am: Digitizing contemporary and traditional dance practices for education, analysis and creativity. Sarah Whatley (Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University).

11:00-11:30am Break

11:30am–12:15pm: Addressing Digital Affordance: Mapping Cross Cultural Value in 3D Scanned Belongings. Hannah Turner and Reese Muntean, Simon Frazer University.

12:15–1pm: Digital Ghost Effects. Kriss Ravetto , UC Davis.

1–2pm Lunch.

2pm–2:45pm: Gurrutu 3.0 : objects, relations and the digital turn in north-east Arnhem Land (Australia). Jessica De Largy Healy (CNRS)

2:45–3:30pm: Discussion: How the law relates to collaborative, tacit, and embodied knowledge forms. What shape could a digital heritage take? Mario Biagioli UC Davis

3:30–4pm Workshop closing.