Safeguarding and Accessing Drama as Intangible Cultural Heritage

Storytelling, especially in the form called drama, is pervasive across cultures and ages. Though much attention has been devoted to the preservation of the physical supports of drama (e.g., films and tapes), there is a widespread acknowledgment that such tangible heritage is the expression of an intangible notion of drama. This article introduces drama as a form of intangible cultural heritage and presents a solution for its preservation in terms of a formal encoding through a computational ontology. After the review of a formal representation of drama, called Drammar, developed in previous works, we show how an abstraction of drama can be encoded into a digital item. We also show how the method proposed is compliant with the major initiatives for the documentation of cultural heritage, namely CIDOC-CRM and FRBR. Finally, we test the applicability of our solution by showing how the major tenets of two well-known theories of drama can be encoded in Drammar and presenting the results of a focus group of drama scholars and practitioners who have accessed the encoding through a visualization system. The encoding and visualization system have turned out to be a promising support for teaching and investigating drama.