The Canon project builds on previous research and resources relating to the history of technical theatre. More than that, it continues a significant tradition of sharing information and ideas, based on principles of mutual support and cooperation.
Open knowledge is knowledge that is free to use without restrictions. The starting point is that knowledge is a common good that belongs to everyone, and that sharing knowledge benefits everyone.
Even if open source, open knowledge, crowd sourcing and similar concepts seem to be recent phenomena, in reality their history dates back to, for example, the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers of Denis Diderot in the 1750’s (Q30590). He allowed re-use of his work in return to him having material from other authors. In the 1950s and 1960s, much computer software was open source, and the early days of the internet in the 1990s gave the movement a boost. The start of Wikipedia in 2001 gave it a visible face to the world. In the same year Lawrence Lessig and Eric Eldred designed the Creative Commons License (CCL) because they saw a need for a license between the existing modes of copyright and public domain status. Version 1.0 of the licenses was officially released on 16 December 2002.
Within the theatre technical field, sharing information is crucial. Most professional organisations like OISTAT (Q30470), STEPP (Q92) and others have in their mission statements such as ‘to stimulate the exchange of ideas and innovations’, ‘to share knowledge’, ‘to encourage life-long learning’, ‘Informing our members’, and so on. Often the sharing is more informal between members, but some collaborative projects have received international recognition.
One example is Theatre Words, an OISTAT project that started in 1975 and collected more than 2000 theatre terms in 25 different languages. In 2011 Digital Theatre Words (DTW, Q20190), was presented at the Prague Quadrennial. The project was entirely volunteer based, with Jerôme Maeckelbergh (Q758) and Michael Ramsaur (Q30592) the leading forces. The Canon project’s Canonbase has reused the information to develop a taxonomy and add historical terms.
The ETTE project (Q30573) is another joint project that is Open knowledge. The project developed basic safety learning content in different languages. it was supported by European Erasmus funding, and one of the requirements was to publish results in open source, based on the principle that what the community funds should go back to the community.
The EUTA Theatre Architecture database (Q494) and Observatorio de Espacios Escénicos (Q30593) are two other examples of open data generated by international groups in our field. The first lists important historic theatres and describes them. The second is an observatory that places the theatres on historic maps.
The Canon of Technical Theatre History project started in 2019 and builds further on this tradition. The project developed one hundred stories that reflect the main turning points of the technical theatre history, a series of tools to be used in education, a set of inspirational methodologies for teaching, and a network of interested parties in heritage and history of technical theatre. All this information is gathered in a database that is called Canonbase. Everything developed in the project can be reused by anyone without restrictions.
The Canonbase integrates and safeguards information from different open sources and makes collections accessible that are otherwise hard to find. It links the information together so new relations become visible and the information is enriched with source documents. Moreover, it visualises the information by means of timelines, maps, trees and word clouds. The project also created new information by researching in depth the information gathered in the database.
The information is structured in an open data format, so it can be reused by querying the database or exported after the project to the world-wide Wikidata platform. The project setup and methodology guarantees that research from both teachers and students feeds back into education and to the wider professional field. The results can be used by local stakeholders, which reinforces the link between the local community and the educational field. The network that originates from this cooperation guarantees future development and sustainability of the results.
After the project the Canonbase will be used as a collaborative platform where researchers can put their raw research information and link it to the results of others, enriching the common knowledge base. At the same time, it can be used to crowd source information based on a growing network of volunteers and professionals.
Because ‘What is Ours is Yours’ and ‘every day there is one day more of history’.