Reflections on “Affect and digital caregiving: challenging the performing arts canon with a ’dig where you stand’ database”

Abstract

This piece addresses the creative canon, of practitioners who are noticed and validated by the dominant discourses of the performing arts and their histories. In these discussions, the canon is enacted through the archive by means of practices such as collecting and documentation. Whose archives are taken into the collection and whose are excluded? Once in the archive, whose names — and therefore activities and legacy — are docu-mented as part of the cataloguing process, and whose remain invisible because they are undocumented by selective cataloguing practices and systems? By what institutional, professional or individual inequalities might some be privileged over others? If these are the risks of the archive, then a countering view, seen in this article, is that the archive is a source of data that can be used, through digital humanities work, to challenge and expand the canon. The article also touches on exhibition making as another manifestation and perpe-trator of the canon. In a museum context, the exhibition is a product of an institution and of individuals, who may have their own ‘master narrative’ and blindness. What is the museum’s position in relation to the diversity of its collecting or exhibition functions? the relation-ships between the institution, the collection, and practitioners of all may be a mechanism of the canon.