About this site
This digital archive website is a part of a thesis by creative work prepared by Gavin Findlay, PhD candidate at the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University in Canberra. The accompanying dissertation willk be available in the appendices in due course.
This website demonstrates a novel approach to digital archives that addresses some well-known problems in digital theatre scholarship. The archive's data ontology reflects the creative theatre production of Splinters as an ecosystem—an assemblage of artists operating in a cultural landscape over an extended period, where interactions with places, audiences and the broader community informed new work. This creative ecosystem produced intangible cultural heritage in the form of cutural expression encoded on our memories and bodies is in ongoing dialogue with the places and spaces where the work was seen. This intagible heritage is also conveyed in the striking visial imagery of Splinters represented here in video, photos, posters and other records. An exhibition and reunion performances in 2013 acted to revitalise this intangible heritage and documentation of these events has been added to the archive.
The overarching aim is to make digital archiving an easier and less expensive and time consuming process for artists, providing a method for smaller and experimental theatre practitioners and companies to make their own digital archives more readily. These can then be easily linked to the network of collecting institutions and become more readily findable. Using recently developed free and open-source software tools, viewers are enabled to explore the archive using frameworks that evoke a sense of place, so important to Splinters’ work, and are able to upload archival material and leave comments and tags that contribute data for further research.