Introduction
The Performascope is an online bilingual French-English lexicon aimed to provide a terminological platform of the performative turn in research and research-creation. It was designed within the framework of the Performance Lab, a cross-disciplinary funded programme at the University Grenoble Alpes (UGA).
Conceived as an international platform, the Performance Lab project has been bringing together a multidisciplinary community of researchers, artists and artist-scholars in performing arts, social sciences, biomechanics and computer sciences to address contemporary issues of embodiment, society, and technology. The project strives to renew the ways in which research is understood and practiced at the UGA by developing new performative, practice led and practice-based methodologies.
The ambition of the Performascope is to create a lexicon to facilitate scientific discourse between the different disciplines working within the Performance Lab at UGA. As such the Performascope provides documentation and reflective analysis of the scientific activities conducted within the Performance Lab.
Origins
The Performascope developed over five stages. Between 2019 and 2021 this included a collection of interviews of the members of the Performance lab, a selection of key terms gathered from the interviews, a bibliographic review of the terms collected, the development of a database model, and research on the graphic design of the tool. In June 2022 we began inviting colleagues outside of the Performance Lab to contribute to the lexicon.
Interviews
From November 2019 to December 2020, twenty-four interviews were conducted with researchers and artists working with the Performance Lab. Those interviewed included: Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, Léa Andréoléty, Julie Arménio, Jennifer Buyck, Andrea Giomi, Marion Guyez, Rachel Gomme, Annie Hannauer, Nathalie Henrich Bernardoni, Myriam Houssay Holzschuch, Lise Landrin, Alice Lenay, Inge Linder-Gaillard, Marie Mianowski, Gretchen Schiller, Lionel Reveret, Claire Revol, Rémi Ronfard, Séverine Ruset, Gabriele Sofia, Joëlle Thollot and Julie Valero.
These interviews made it possible to collect information regarding academics’ research and their specific usage of terms. This included research intentions, main questions, methodologies and protocols of each of the researchers involved. By providing an overview of the profiles and practices of the researchers at work in the Performance Lab, the interviews served in identifying interdisciplinary reflections, issues, and objects of study. They thus provided the main basis for collecting a set of vocabulary that would eventually establish a list of the lexicon’s key terms.
The List of Perspectives
The relevant criteria taken into consideration during the selection process of terms focused on articulating theoretical and practical links with Performance Studies, Performance as Research, Practice based and led research as well as Research creation. The selection method was inspired by the approach proposed in the article “Building a domain ontology from glossaries” by Loris Bozzato, Mauro Ferrari, and Alberto Trombetta (2008). From this reference, we notably adopted the steps consistent in clustering the key terms, saturating the list of perspectives, and categorizing these entries through class groupings. In combination with this method, an additional step was taken to calculate the occurrence of key terms throughout the interview process, in order to prioritize certain entries. This work consisted in alternating between a global overview of the list and a localized look at the use of these key terms in the interviews.
Once the list of terms was established, three main categories were decided upon: “Approach”, “Concept”, and “Method”. In addition, cross-references between entries were also added.
Bibliographic literary review
The annotated bibliographic research process consisted in gathering authoritative references from the scientific world. Quotations were chosen for their precision, clarity, and, if possible, the legitimacy of their authors. One of the objectives in this process was to stimulate debate on the basis of singular and complimentary definitions gathered into a single corpus. These definitional elements may be potentially contradictory or controversial. Nevertheless, these definitional connections aim to allow for the construction of a term not as a consensus but rather as an intra- or interdisciplinary dialectic.
The Data Model
The lexicon consists of a list of entries composed of four component elements: definitions, perspectives, citations, and bibliographies.
The brief working definitions introduce the key terms in order to provide a framework of their theoretical and disciplinary meaning. They were written collectively by the Performascope project team.
The perspectives are texts written by researchers/artists, based on their field experiences.
The citations are author quotations that propose defining points of their subject matter, providing consensus and coming from bibliographic sources.
The bibliographies are bibliographic references meant to provide further information on the chosen citations.
The lexicon’s technical development aligns itself with the Semantic Web’s criteria. We chose to describe our lexicon using the tool Opentheso. This thesaurus administrator was developed under the direction of Miled Rousset of the Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée (Lyon) and published under CeCILL-C licensing in compliance with ISO 25964 norms. Thanks to Opentheso, we now have a semantic and interoperable description of our data at our disposal.
As such, we have aligned our data model with the SKOS model (Simple Knowledge Organization System):
https://performance-lab.huma-num.fr/admin?crudAction=edit&crudControllerFqcn=App%5CController%5CAdmin%5CPageCrudController&entityId=2&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fperformance-lab.huma-num.fr%2Fadmin%3FcrudAction%3Dindex%26crudControllerFqcn%3DApp%255CController%255CAdmin%255CPageCrudController%26signature%3DiWFtt0L6lArAd-p0kGf2ba5uuy3jKiY02vypISQPKTA&signature=QSLgCltoem7lMHy8fYTPdzQIHU8I8D1S3r10rpoIKHg
| Notre modèle |
Opentheso |
SKOS |
| Term |
Terme |
prefLabel |
| Categorie |
Groupe |
Collection |
| Definition |
Note éditoriale |
editorialNote |
| Quotation |
Définition |
definition |
| Bibliography |
Définition |
definition |
| Perspective |
Note de portée |
scopeNote |
| Related term |
Concept associé |
related |
Graphic Design
Vincent Maillard designed the graphic interface and navigation of the website.
The lexicon’s graphic design is inspired by the concept of semantic mapping, drawing upon the visual principals unique in cartography. The work of Jacques Bertin has served as a main point of reference here, especially concerning the conception of visual variables. Different types of CSS gradients were in this way associated with each key term component.
In order to provide a comfortable reading experience, the graphic design was limited to two colors and a single typographical font called “Vollkorn”, drawn by Friedrich Althausen and published under Open Font License.
The homepage makes it possible to filter, sort, and search within the list of key terms, to facilitate browsing the entries. Key term detail pages allow the content to be read through a system of tabs, each representing a different page component.
The site’s technical architecture is based on a combination of two tools. Opentheso was used for semantic description, and Symfony was used to generate searchable pages. The site’s data is stored through an export of the Opentheso web service, which permits file versioning of the various design steps of the lexicon.
The project’s source code is published under GPL-3.0 licensing.
Seminars
Several seminars also helped in constructing the lexicon, the first of which took place in June 2019 and posed the question of how the terms “Place”, “Stage”, and “Field” might be taken up. In June 2020, a seminar was held to review the terminology used in each of the Performance Lab workpackages. In December 2020, the list of entries was presented to members of the Performance Lab, and the call for contributions officially opens June 21, 2022.
Call for contributions for the perspectives and creation of a scientific committee
A call for contributions for the writing of the perspectives was launched at the beginning of the year 2021 to researchers and artists allowing to obtain 47 contributions written by 25 contributors and read by a scientific committee created for this project.
Project team and contributors
Project team
The Performascope, housed within the Maison de la Création et de l’Innovation on the UGA campus, is a joint project lead by Gretchen Schiller and Anne-Laure Amilhat-Szary, and endorsed by Rémi Ronfard.
The team initially included Özgül Akinci (Post-doctoral fellow on a PAUSE contract), Amélie Bourduge (Intern), Pamela Hammar (Intern), and Carolane Sanchez (Researcher), who conducted interviews, initiated documentary research, organized seminars, and managed exchanges between project actors.
In 2020-2021, the selection of terms, the collection of citations and bibliographic elements, the coordination of perspectives, the writing of definitions and the formatting of texts were carried out collectively by Sarah Houari (Documentary researcher), Vincent Maillard (Web designer), Alice Ferraglio (Erasmus+ intern), Martin Givors (Researcher) and Felix de Montety (Documentary researcher).
The website was developed by Vincent Maillard who designed the aesthetics and the functionalities and put the textual content online.
Translation
French – English: Lauren Fabrizio (intern in M1 LLCER, Anglophone studies course, UGA), Caroline Schlenker (independent translator), Kieran Puillandre (PhD student in Film Studies)
English – French: Laure Fernandez (independent translator)
Contributors to the writing of the perspectives
Contributors’ list.
Scientific editorial board
The role of the Scientific editorial board is to provide a scientific perspective on the elements of the project. It is consulted to ensure the critical re-reading of the contents and to suggest modifications or new orientations.
Guarantors of the quality of the contents published in the Performascope, its members are: Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, Anne Cayuela, Alice Folco, Martin Givors, Jen Harvie, Inge Linder Gaillard, Felix de Montety, Rémi Ronfard, Derek McCormack, Marie-Christine Lesage, VK Preston, Elizabeth Claire, Carrie Noland, Gretchen Schiller, Jean-Paul Thibaud.
Become a contributor
If you are interested in proposing an entry, please contact us at performascope-contact@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr.
The Performascope project is to extend the epistemological reflection in connection with the scientific activity of the Performance Lab researchers with an international community. It seeks to take stock of and question the concepts and research methods taken up within the multidisciplinary scientific studies conducted in the scope of the Performance Lab. To meet this objective, the initial Performascope team relied on criteria of relevance which subsequently determined the choice of terms to be included in the lexicon. As such, the addition of an entry may be possible if:
- The entry refers to a term which corresponds to a scientific practice, research method, theoretical approach,
or an academic discipline. Certain terms may correspond with several of these categories. For example, it is
understood that the term "Score" can refer to a tool for notion as well as a mode of creation.
- Use of the term is more or less closely related to the field of performance and to the problems intrinsic to the
Performance lab in the Performing, Social sciences, and Computer science domains.
- The selected term provokes a dialogue of multidisciplinary – or even international – interest
that is scientific in nature.
Perspectives
Written contributions to the site are meant to cultivate and illustrate understandings of a lexical term through the personal experience of a researcher or artist in the context of their chosen field of study. These texts are not meant to provide canonical synthesis or dictionary definitions, but rather to offer access to concepts, tools, methodologies, protocols of related disciplines as they are understood, practiced, and experienced by a particular researcher or artist. In this way, the texts should take the form of lessons learned through a research experience, or reflexive writing on specific scientific or artistic practices, both theoretical and empirical.
Texts are expected in a written format of around 3,000 characters, spaces included – around one full page – organized into two or three paragraphs. Pronoun choice – "I" or "we" – is left up to the author. Given that these contributions are not scientific articles, it is advised to not include bibliographic references, neither in the body of the text nor in the text’s footnotes. Nevertheless, the author is encouraged to cite and include at the end of their text one or two of their own publications – personal work referenced online, printed works, etc. – in which they have taken up the given lexical term. In addition, contributions may be co-written by several authors.
The Performascope editorial committee is responsible for examining new written contributions. Their role consists of assessing all submitted texts against a predefined interpretive framework.
Definition
A brief working definition is provided for each key term in order to provide a summary of its theoretical and disciplinary scope. These notes are tools of lexical disambiguation – between 3 and 8 lines, they give a brief, general sense of each term. They permit us to construct a pathway between the common use of the term in question and its accompanying canonical definitions within various fields of study. As an entryway to a research concept, these notes establish the origins of their subject matter while also allowing us to situate and frame uses of such key terms within the lexical context.
Each working definition should adequately address the semantics – whether polysemic or singular in its meaning – according to the reference and definition elements cited in the Performascope. As such, each definition should be sufficiently comprehensible and accessible to all readers without presuming their level of familiarity with the concept or with the field of research to which it refers.
Citations and bibliography
Citation proposals should respect the formats and objectives set by the ‘Citation’ component of the Performascope site: synthetic definitions that provide theoretical consensus through precision, clarity, and possibly the legitimacy of the authors. These definitional elements may be potentially contradictory or controversial. However, these occasional conflicts are aimed at constructing these research notions not as unanimous but rather intra- or interdisciplinary dialectics.
The bibliographical references are a kind of opening meant to enrich their related citations. The citation method used for a bibliographic source must conform with the lexicon’s norms of citation.
Indicate additional information
If you notice any gaps or imperfections in Performascope, do not hesitate to contact us to suggest improvements or additional content.
