Model for the dynamic documentation of artistic research
Rui Penha,
ESMAE proposes a new model for the dynamic documentation of artistic research, capable of overcoming the limitations of traditional models, particularly emphasised by the research in performing arts.
Introduction
Context and needs for documenting artistic research
Traditionally published on paper — in the form of dissertations, books or magazine articles —, research documentation models emphasise the written word and relegate other elements to the role of illustrating or condensing the information that supports the main written arguments. In the digital age, the PDF format has easily taken over the place of the printed page in scientific dissemination, largely because it combines the ease of digital dissemination with the characteristics we value in paper: the immutability of each copy of the original, the page as the means of navigation and the text and still image as the primary content vehicles.
As with the paper documents it is intended to emulate, the PDF format does not, however, include the possibility of embedding audiovisual elements. Audio and video recordings, in PDF documents as in paper books and dissertations, are usually relegated to annexes or included as links to other media. This solution subordinates the audiovisual arguments and is constitutes a major obstacle to the fluidity of their articulation with the other elements of a project's documentation. Furthermore, the usual dependence on commercial platforms (e.g. YouTube) for the dissemination of audiovisual media limits the ability to guarantee the correct and lasting deposit of this content in institutional repositories.
These limitations are particularly penalising for artistic research, particularly in the context of the performing arts. At a time of unprecedented access to audiovisual documentation, this difficulty feels somewhat anachronistic. Similarly, the use of page numbers as the main means of navigating and indexing quickly shows its inadequacy in an era when printing dissertations and articles on paper has fallen into disuse. There is thus an pressing need to find a solution for documenting artistic research projects that enables:
- the integration of audiovisual elements in close articulation with traditional text and image elements;
- the fluid experience of all the contents in the weaving of a truly multimedia argument;
- easy navigation and referencing of all these elements, both in a reading context and in the context of a viva;
- the ability to smoothly and quickly design and modify multimedia documents without the need for extensive knowledge of web technologies;
- institutional independence with regard to technologies for implementing and archiving the documentation of artistic research.
The solution proposed by ESMAE
As a solution to this problem, ESMAE is proposing a new model for the dynamic documentation of artistic research. In this model, based on web technologies, the articulation of words, images, audio and video is fully integrated. This webpage is presented as an example of this documentation model, as a small catalogue of its possibilities and, finally, as an instruction manual for its implementation. The final element of this documentation model is an HTML page identical to this document, which will be archived at ESMAE's artistic research website, along with all the relevant files (image, video and audio) and any attachments, such as, e.g., PDF files.
The HTML format is an open and standardised format that is available on all platforms and allows for the easy inclusion of multimedia elements. It is a format that makes it easy to disseminate content and cross-reference information, not only through citations, but also (and above all) through direct hyperlinks to the page as a whole or to any of its elements. Navigation of this document, for reading or arguing purposes, can be done through the numbering that is automatically assigned to all paragraphs, footnotes, figures, galleries, videos, audios, and external media. A small text field appears permanently in the bottom left-hand corner of the window, labelled go to^[Or ir para, in the portuguese version.]. When you type in a number, the page automatically jumps to the paragraph in question, temporarily signalling it. If one uses the prefixes n, f, g, v, a or m, the page automatically jumps to the [foot]note, figure, gallery, video, audio or external medium with the relevant number (e.g. 12 to jump to the paragraph with the number twelve, v1 to jump to the video with the number one or n2 to jump to the footnote number two).
Developing the documentation for ESMAE's artistic research projects does not, however, involve writing any HTML, CSS, Javascript or similar web technologies. This template was built on the ghost platform and allows for easy editing and publishing of new pages, automatically generating the formatting, index, numbering and navigation functionalities.
Editing posts in the ghost editor
Editing pages on ghost is done exclusively via the online editor, which is available to anyone with a contributor account on this website. However, it is also possible to write offline in any external application and then copy the content into the ghost editor, which generally does an excellent conversion job, particularly with content from markdown editors such as Ulysses, iA Writer or Obsidian. ghost's text editor allows you to transform any typographic element into bold, italics and links via the menu bar that appears when you select a text element:
In addition to this simple formatting, one can turn any paragraph into a main heading or a secondary heading (using the large H or the smaller H, respectively) and into two citation formats (using the inverted commas once or twice, respectively). The way these elements appear in the editor is not exactly the same that will appear on the final page, but one can preview the page at any time using the preview button in the top right-hand corner. The website address that appears on the preview page can be copied and sent to anyone (e.g., the supervisor or reviewer) without making the page available to the general public. Whenever the page is refreshed (e.g. using the cmd/ctrl+s shortcut), the preview will also be updated.
Multimedia elements
The ghost editor's extensive menu of options allows for the inclusion of various types of multimedia elements, both internal — i.e. placed on ESMAE's server, such as images, image galleries, videos or audios — and external — e.g. videos made available by YouTube or Vimeo and musical works made available by Spotify or SoundCloud. ESMAE can only guarantee the archive of internal multimedia elements, so all elements created as part of the internal projects must always be included in this way. The inclusion of external elements should be reserved for references to material whose copyright does not belong to the creators of the project and which, therefore, cannot be placed on ESMAE's servers. All elements should have captions, as only elements with captions will be numbered and, consequently, will be made accessible via the page navigation.
To prevent unnecessary strain on server resources, the videos on the page are only loaded when the user plays them. Thus, all internal videos appear by default with a black background. To set a video preview image, the Custum thumbnail option should be set, using, for example, the first frame of the video in question.
ESMAE's server has an active limit of 50 Mb for the size of files to be integrated into the page. Although this limit is sufficient for short videos and most compressed audio files, for longer videos and audio files it is possible to integrate multimedia elements from FCCN's educast platform, available to the entire ESMAE community via the institutional login. The supported formats are mp4, mov, m4v, mpeg, mpg, wav, mp3 and aac. Once we create an educast account, we must create a channel and upload the video or audio, following educast's instructions. When the content is available for viewing, simply copy the link provided by educast to download it, in the location shown in the following image:
With this link, the video can be integrated into the ESMAE template by entering the code !educastVideo[_URL_](_Caption_) in a separate paragraph, replacing the expression _URL_ with the link copied from the educast and the expression _Caption_ with the caption of the video. In a practical example, the following video was generated automatically by entering the code !educastVideo[https://educast.fccn.pt/vod/clips/1ust6ked5k/desktop.mp4?locale=pt](Educast video integrated into the ESMAE model.):
!educastVideo[https://educast.fccn.pt/vod/clips/1ust6ked5k/desktop.mp4?locale=pt](Educast video integrated into the ESMAE model)
Content uploaded to educast, by virtue of being an fccn platform, is considered as an institutional repository. Audio examples can also be integrated from educast using the !educastAudio[_URL_](_Caption_) code. In a practical example, the following audio was generated automatically by entering the code !educastAudio[https://educast.fccn.pt/vod/clips/r1o3gyqje/desktop.mp4?locale=pt](Audio from educast integrated into the ESMAE model.):
!educastAudio[https://educast.fccn.pt/vod/clips/r1o3gyqje/desktop.mp4?locale=pt](Audio from educast integrated into the ESMAE model.)
The article's header image must be defined in the appropriate field when creating each new page. This image will also be used to identify the article in the site menu and will not be numbered. This image can optionally be captioned, as can be seen on this page, as a way of, e.g., giving the relevant credits. The editor also offers the option of using an image from the Unsplash online archive, in which case it automatically adds a caption with the respective credits. Although it is always preferable to use an image specific to each project — or, alternatively, an image from ESMAE's Flickr archive — it is possible to use suitable images from Unsplash, in which case the automatically generated caption should be maintained.
URL, tags, abstract and author(s)
The menu at the top right of the ghost editor allows one to define the general characteristics of the document. The page URL (automatically generated from the page title) can be changed to a shorter one and it is iteratively numbered in case of duplication. Public tags allow the navigation from the main website and must be defined in accordance with the following rules:
- the first tag should always identify the context in which the page was created: in the case of master's programmes, Artes Cénicas for MAC, Artes e Tecnologias do Som for MATS, Composição for MC, Ensino de Música for MEM and Interpretação Artística for MIA; Criação Artística in the case of the doctoral programme; Eventos in the case of artistic research events; Pesquisa Artística in the case of other projects.
- in the case of theses or dissertations, a second tag with the type of degree in question should also be used: Mestrados or Doutoramentos.
An abstract, with a maximum length of 300 characters, should always be defined. It will be used both in the main website menu and in the header of the page itself. Authors can only be identified if they have an account on the website, and the first author is the one responsible for the publication. Each author will be able to define the elements of their profile that will appear on the page with the list of pages that they have authored or co-authored.
Reviewing articles before publication
As described above, the article preview link can be shared with anyone, inside or outside ESMAE, for review before publication. For a more in-depth review, e.g. that of the work's supervisor, it is possible to give editing access to another person by adding them as a co-author.^[This co-authorship can be provisional and can be added or removed at any time, before or after the page is published.] With editing access, the reviewer can make changes to the page and/or leave comments in the form of callouts:
Special features of the ESMAE model
Index
The table of contents for each page is generated automatically, listing all the main and secondary headings in a hierarchical way, as seen on the top of this page.
Endnotes
One can create footnotes^[Like the one shown here.] using the markdown syntax, with the characters ^ and [ to mark the start of the footnote and the character ] to close it. In the page view, the notes are automatically numbered and both the references and the links are created by the ghost theme. In the ghost editor, this paragraph appears as follows:
Generating the bibliography
The list of bibliographical references can be compiled manually or from any manager that allows the export of formatted bibliographical lists, such as, e.g., Zotero. If one places this list in the document under a heading that consists exclusively of the words bibliografia, referências, bibliography or references (in any combination of upper or lower case), these lines will not be numbered and will be formatted as a series of bibliographical references, as can be seen in the following example:
Bibliography
Borges, J. L. (2017). Este Ofício de Poeta (T. Costa, Trans.). Relógio d’Água.
Cazeaux, C. (2017). Art, research, philosophy. Routledge.
Coessens, K., Crispin, D., & Douglas, A. (2010). The Artistic turn: A manifesto. Leuven Univ. Press.
Kiefer, A. (2015). A Arte há de Sobreviver às suas Ruínas (J. D. de Almeida, Trans.). Deriva Editores.
Penha, R. (2019). On the reality clarified by art. ÍMPAR: Online Journal for Artistic Research, 3-44 Pages.
Special tags
In ghost, all tags that begin with the # (hashtag) symbol are, by definition, internal tags, i.e. tags that are used to define page characteristics without being used for navigation. The ESMAE template defines five special tags of this type:
#en: the language of the page is set to English and all the elements generated by the model are also translated.#no-index: automatic index generation is disabled.#no-author: the page will appear without a designated author and will not appear in the author's list of pages (a useful option, e.g., for event pages).#no-navigation: the navigation and paragraph numbering features are disabled.#no-numbering: the numbering of multimedia elements is disabled.
Tables
To draw tables one uses the paragraph element with markdown syntax. The | character is used to delimit the cells in each row and the second row defines the alignment of the entire column using the : character, with left alignment when absent, right alignment when present on the right side of the horizontal lines and centre alignment when present on both sides. As an example, to generate the following table:
| Header 1 | Header 2 | Header 3 |
|---|---|---|
| left | centre | right |
| other line | other line | other line |
one would use the following markdown syntax:
| Header 1 | Header 2 | Header 3 |
| ---------- | :--------: | ---------: |
| left | centre | right |
| other line | other line | other line |