Beyond the Happening: Performance Art and the Politics of Communication

Abstract

home turf. This generative bent makes the book well-suited to inclusion on syllabi for graduate methods courses or project-based advanced undergraduate courses. Outside the classroom, Theater as Data will be valuable to data-oriented theatre, dance, and performance studies research projects of any complexity, from a simple Zotero database of Victorian newspaper clippings that will inform a solo-authored monograph to a million-point network analysis visualization destined for a crossinstitutional NEH grant. Importantly, while the book is informative for research that prioritizes data, it does not speak to the full spectrum of digital humanities (DH) work that is possible and ongoing in theatre, dance, and performance studies. Happily, Varela points out that he uses ‘computational’ rather than ‘digital’ (14) precisely to avoid giving this impression. In so doing, Theater as Data sidesteps a mistake too often made by quantitative work that fails to understand the many instances of qualitative and interpretive DH research that exist across the fields. Another important note the book strikes is advocacy for more scholars to become familiar with programming: ‘The more we increase our programming proficiency, the more resilient we will be as a community that does not need to outsource decision-making to other disciplines and to commercial companies’ (181). While this shift would be beneficial, it is also important to acknowledge that, even with simple tools, the time exigencies of technological upskilling can be incompatible with the demands of career and personal life for many scholars. And it bears noting that DH projects cannot escape the infamous iron triangle of design, wherein any project can pick two from the list of ‘fast, good, and cheap’. Spending one token on the ‘cheap’ of a do-it-yourself approach leaves a choice between a protracted completion date or subpar quality. Hiring and managing coders to build a project ‘fast and good’ does not have to mean handing over decision-making along with the grunt work. This observation is less critique than it is agreement that we should find more ways to lower the barriers to participation for humanists and increase the number and quality of projects in this vital new realm. By providing the methodological cornerstone the field has needed to begin such an endeavor, Theater as Data is likely to become the definitive guide to using computational data in theatre, dance, and performance studies research. © E.B. Bradley Hunter https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10486801.2022.2009660