Cultural Digital newsletter #133
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week! We have theatre, dance, books, and two people that happen to have the same name. What are the odds?!
You will not regret watching Dance of the Line Riders from beginning to end.
Digital dance
The 92Y Mobile Dance Film Festival explores "the magic that happens at the intersection of choreography, camerawork and editing". The NYT have done a write-up too: The Next Wave of Dance Films, Made on Your Phone, Is Here.
The Digital Season: Scottish Ballet. "Run as a close collaboration between the artistic and the marketing departments, […] the Digital Season included the premiere of four new dance films, including a 360-degree film and a work created ‘live’ in 5 days (daily Facebook Live streams showed the choreographic process), plus the stream of a full company class and a digital art installation".
Theatre and tech
Edinburgh Fringe 2018: Multimedia Theatre. "We speak to three theatre makers whose Fringe shows use technological innovations – some sensational, some simple – to get closer to their audiences".
The Future of Theatre and Technology. This is sold out now, but Punchdrunk are bringing together "theatre makers, creatives and technologists in conversation […] as they share past experiences along with ambitions and provocations for the future".
Digital literature
Move Over, Shakespeare: This Sonnet-Writing A.I. is the Poet We Need. "Trained on around 2,600 real sonnets, it mimics the iambic pentameter and rhyming pattern of the poems most famously written by ol’ Bill Shakespeare himself". The paper is here: Deep-speare: A Joint Neural Model of Poetic Language, Meter and Rhyme and the abstract says that while they got the rhyme/meter down, "machine-generated poems still underperform in terms of readability and emotion".
This reminded me of Help me shakespeare! A Twilio-powered SMS bot with sentiment analysis, and original sonnets.
Booksquashing is a nice concept from The Bodleian Libraries. "it’s important to recognise the gaps between the physical original and the digital copy. In that spirit, we’re going to […] examine the strengths and weaknesses of our digital surrogates in conveying that physicality".
Meet the YouTube Stars Turning Viewers Into Readers. Booktubers are a thing.
Tom Scott news
Digital transformation at Wellcome Collection. Tom Scott asks "how do you create an environment where you can foster a culture that makes it possible to design, build and produce the things that matter to your users? In this article I will try to outline how we (Wellcome Collection’s digital department) have tried to create such a culture and the processes we’ve adopted to support that culture".
STORIES FROM THE STORES. Science Museum Group have got a new YouTube series fronted by (a different) Tom Scott. I once saw him use a big tub of mint yoghurt to launch a bottle rocket. True fact.
Other things
Arts Council England: The Conversation. "4. Digital is seen to present both an opportunity and a threat for the sector". I've only skimmed this, but it's from the summary of a recent consultation.
Set your summer schedule with events in Search. Google have been doing more with their event listing markup. Worth knowing about if you want people to discover your events.
Metallica are using Spotify data to put their setlists together.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at Cog Design (who really want a project manager), Art UK, the Crafts Council, British Museum, and more.
If you made it down here then please reward yourself by watching the Dance of the Line Riders again.
Chris Unitt
The Library is a treasure trove of arts/digital info. It's just been updated with new websites and some extra examples of job descriptions. Find out more about The Library.