Artistic Exchanges [ArtEx]: The Royal Danish Theatre and Europe

The Royal Danish Theatre was and is a key institution for cultivating and examining Danish national identity, but its significance largely owed to a marked transnational outlook and artistic exchange. From its foundation in 1748, the theatre attracted the foremost international artists and Danish artists travelled extensively. The theatre thus mirrors the broader history of the long 19th century’s formation of national identities which paradoxically relied on intense transnational exchange. ArtEx will conduct the first major study of the theatre’s internationally unique and remarkably extensive archive combining digital tools and qualitative case studies with the objective of exploring 1) How artistic practices and aesthetic ideas intersected and travelled across Europe 1748-1948; 2) how cultural exchange help us understand how art, artists and institutions of art act as agents for shaping (trans)national identities; and 3) how European spaces and cultures are imagined and performed.

The role of Center for Humanities Computing

CHC is responsible for developing three ‘digital tools’ that support qualitative case studies of artists’ travel routes and visual/image-based comparisons of image data such as design sketches, pictorial inventories, and protocols.

1. TextDB (database) – a fulltext database and search engine for research in large text collections.
2. ArtexGraph (graph-viewer) – intuitive graphical user interface for building and analyzing networks with NetworkX and Graphviz 
3. deepRDT (image-viewer) – a tool for exploring similarities between image data such Page 2/3 as design sketches, pictorial inventories and protocols