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Mapping Performance Culture: Nottingham 1857-1867
2006 - 2009

Principal Investigators
Jo Robinson (PI, School of English)
Gary Priestnall
Robin Burgess (Research Associate in Interactive Mapping)
Colin Bannister and Richard Tyler-Jones (Information Services)

Funding
Arts and Humanities Research Council

Project Overview
This project investigates the performance culture of Nottingham, 1857-1867. In a key collaboration between theatre history and Geographical Information Science it will develop an intuitive interactive map and research database, which will layer social, cultural and economic data onto a spatial representation of the town. In doing so, the research seeks to recuperate as far as possible the social and cultural landscape through which the spectators of performance in mid-nineteenth century Nottingham moved on their way to the theatre, lecture rooms, or the town’s Goose Fair, enabling the researchers to bring new methodologies to researching the interrelationships of both repertoire and spectatorship. The design of a web-based interactive map offers potential for a creative and innovative approach to representing spatio-temporal patterns. Performance events varied greatly in nature, in duration, and in spatial scale. These events were set against a backdrop of major changes to the urban layout of central Nottingham during this period and also could be viewed in the context of a range of social and cultural ‘overlays’. The challenge is to create an interactive map which utilises a timeline in such a way as to enable patterns in the data to be explored as easily as possible. There is potential to explore techniques for ‘clustering’ events in both space and time and also for incorporating a variety of archive data into a single information system.

Research Outcomes