The Opening Keynote takes place on Monday, 1 September 2025, at 18:00.

Venue (Seminar Centre):
Room L115
Seminarzentrum der Freien Universität Berlin
Freie Universität Berlin
Otto-von-Simson-Str. 26
14195 Berlin-Dahlem

Clarisse Bardiot:
The Show Programme, the LLM and the Ontology: Designing Workflows for Performing Arts Analytics

Theatre programmes are a vital resource for reconstructing the conditions of a performing arts production. Found across numerous heritage collections, they provide direct data on performers, technicians, and venues while revealing artistic networks, editorial strategies, and institutional dynamics. Although digitisation has enhanced access to these often-overlooked materials, significant methodological challenges persist: inconsistent database transcriptions, heterogeneous data models with limited interoperability, and no reliable link to the original source.

Drawing on the ERC project From Stage to Data, which examines programmes from the Festival d’Avignon (1947–present), this keynote addresses key methodological challenges in performing arts analytics. The presentation outlines a computational workflow that combines Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with an extension of the Linked Art ontology for performing arts. The extracted data are connected to their source via the Arvest platform, ensuring full traceability. Examples from the Avignon corpus demonstrate how this approach enables analyses of artistic circulation and collaboration over time. The presentation also calls for the creation of a comprehensive corpus of theatre programmes, which would unlock numerous research avenues in performing arts history. Such a corpus would provide the research community with standardised, interoperable data, supporting comparative studies across institutions, time periods, and geographical contexts.

drawing

Clarisse Bardiot is a professor of Contemporary Theatre History and Digital Humanities at Rennes 2 University. Her research focuses on the digital traces of the performing arts, the analysis of creative processes, the history and aesthetics of digital performance, the preservation of digital works, and experimental publishing. In 2023, she was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for the project »From Stage to Data, the Digital Turn of Contemporary Performing Arts Historiography (STAGE)«. She is the author of Performing Arts and Digital Humanities: From Traces to Data (Wiley / ISTE 2021).

(image source: clarissebardiot.info)