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Contra Dance as a Cultural Heritage

This project seeks to study the form and style of New England / Appalachian community folk dancing known as contra dance as an intangible cultural heritage (ICH), exploring its roles as a tradition, a performance, and a method of community building, through a pluralist, informatics-based approach.

Digital humanities, knowledge organization, and knowledge representation tools, techniques, and models have been used in this study and are proposed for future research.

Click the links below to learn more about each exploratory method used in this pilot study.

A Narrative

Description-Based Approach

The stories and traditions of many ICHs are described or passed down

from person to person, and

generation to generation.

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Just as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) uses written documentation to register forms of ICH, here you will find a narrative discussion of the history and nature of contra dance.

An Object-Based Approach

In its most basic form, a contra dance is a series of instructions

for dancers to execute particular movements in a certain order,

set to music.

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See how using modified rules for cataloging cultural objects can be applied to examples of contra dance notation as cultural works.

contraobject.png

A Process-Based Approach

Dances are composed, or built, around certain structural elements as well as the flow of human movement and connection.

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See how these pieces are put together as you walk through a dance figure by figure.

contraprocess.png

An Event-Based Approach

Each individual performance of a dance is a real-life occurrence that "expresses" a particular work

at a moment in space and time.

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See how these events can be contextualized through interactive timelines and maps.

contratimeline.jpg
contramap.jpg

A Knowledge-Based Approach

Contra dancing, as a subject domain, has a complex terminology, and can be described by relationships between figures, sequences, tunes, people, organizations, spaces, events, history, folkways, and traditions.

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See some of the methods we can begin to use to understand its cultural value by envisioning contra dance information as vocabulary, knowledge base, and linked data.

Opportunities for

Future Research

This project is the beginning of further research into exploring

many other methods and approaches to study, describe, visualize, and model ICH traditions and events like folk dances.

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Learn more about some of the specific ideas for other research projects that could be avenues for future work and discoveries.

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