Jonathan Bollen, Flinders University
Nathan Lambert, eResearch SA Summer Scholarship Receipient
Bradley Williams, eResearch SA Summer Scholarship Receipient

eResearch SA offers summer scholarships to academic high performers with an interest in eResearch. In 2008, eResearch SA awarded scholarships to Nathan Lambert and Bradley Williams to visualise networks of artistic collaboration using AusStage, supervised by Jonathan Bollen, Flinders University.

AusStage is a relational database of performing arts events. It records the relationships between events, venues, organisations, people, and resources. Researchers know, anecdotally, that social networks operate in the field of performing arts. They also know that interactions between artists, as they train, rehearse and work together, have implications for the kinds of artists they become and the kinds of performances they make. AusStage records the history of these networks of contacts and collaborations. Mapping performing arts events lets us see where artists perform and how productions travel. Network visualisation lets us see how performing artists interact.

The scholarship students set out to analyse these networks by visualising data from AusStage in network graphs and geographic maps. Nathan developed new approaches to analysing data in AusStage by using network visualisation to address the question, ‘who works with whom?’ His project explored software applications, data migration, and techniques for visualising AusStage network data relating to the performing arts in South Australia.

Bradley developed methods for integrating AusStage and venue data with geo-coded data from sources such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics, so as to display the results on interactive maps using Google Maps. His tasks were to research how AusStage data and Google Earth could be used together to provide a visualised map of the data, and how this data could be used in an informative way.

Nathan was successful in creating network graphs that displayed how contributors linked other contributors together (in most cases the linking contributors were the directors, playwrights, or designers). His graphs also provided a visual display of the Australian Dance Theatre’s toured work, showing the company’s wide coverage both within Australia and internationally, links between contributors who had participated in an Adelaide Festival or Fringe event, and a graph of all contributors to a South Australian event between 1970 and 1980.

Bradley found that Google Earth was limited in that it displayed historical events on a contemporary map. He was able to overlay historical maps on Google Earth so that venue data from the late 1800s could be displayed on a map from the same time.

The results of both of these scholarships will feed into future developments in AusStage. Perhaps the most exciting thing about these scholarships is that the approaches to data visualisation the students developed were central in attracting $500,000 of National eResearch Architecture Taskforce (NeAT) funding to develop production services based on these prototypes.