Today, we are pleased to announce a new initiative to build a set of digital publishing and community e-services at the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław. The project is being undertaken with the support of the European Regional Development Fund within the frame of the Regional Operational Programme for Lower Silesia, and will result in the creation of accessible online spaces for educational, scholarly, and cultural heritage content and data from the Grotowski Institute’s programmes and collaborations, delivered by TAPAC and other partners. Information about these resources will be made available through the e-services using Linked Open Data (LOD), meaning that the wider public — as well as other cultural and educational organizations and archives — will be able to access, share, reuse, enrich, and build further projects out of the Institute’s collections and activity, enabling it to reach new audiences and creators.
The project spans work within each of the major areas of the Grotowski Institute’s mission, from opening up archival records to documenting performance training and practice, and from offering high-quality artistic and research publications to curating public events and conferences, some of which will combine live sessions with digital materials and mediated components via the Web. The aim is to complement, contribute to, and extend the Institute’s current online offering by providing additional publishing and data features, with support for multiple languages (English, French, Italian, and Spanish, as well as Polish), interoperability (e.g. with Schema.org), and standards that will make content more accessible for people with disabilities across various devices (for example, by compliance with WCAG 2.1).
With the Grotowski Institute, we have adopted an approach to this project that seeks to put the needs of the audience — that is, you, the reader or viewer — at the centre of the development process. Therefore, we will shortly be sharing some survey questions and other research tools via this site, which we will use to better understand how potential users want to access content and information about theatre, performance, and other cultural and educational activity, and to feed this knowledge into the building of the services in order to adapt and improve them as they are being developed. If you’d like to contribute to these efforts and have your say, please follow our announcements on this site and subscribe to our mailing list to receive updates. If you have a particular interest in open data and the semantic web for the arts and humanities and would like to discuss possible crossover opportunities, please also feel free to get in touch.
The project is being delivered by a team led by TAPAC: Theatre and Performance Across Cultures, a non-profit organization based in the UK, and includes specialist advisors and researchers from around the world. Over the coming weeks, we and our collaborators will be sharing more news and details here about the upcoming plans, the user research process, events, publications, and the launch of the e-services later this year. We encourage you to follow this blog for regular updates and, if you’re interested, to get involved when we release our calls for participation during the summer.
