Moda: Open-Source Democratic Access to Movement Knowledge
MoDa is an open-source movement database allowing public access to shared movement data from multiple social, cultural, and historical contexts. We envision this as a resource for scholars and researchers in the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Health and Natural and Engineering Sciences.
Our contribution extends beyond the movement data itself by also considering the ontological meaning of that data. We emphasize the multi-layered social and cultural contexts of movement and support both expert and folksonomy annotations of movement data. Movement data will be indexed using movement quality frameworks such as Laban Movement Analysis, cultural frameworks such as Choreometrics, and social networking frameworks such as folksonomies.
In our process of capturing and incorporating various contexts of movement we hold public and research workshops that support how and why we can collect movement data. We have held numerous workshops with movement experts to explore meaningful ontological approaches to movement that can enable cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary descriptions and representations. We allow for multiple descriptions that support multiple lenses and multiple ‘truths’ to coexists simultaneously.
This is a collaborative project with movingstories Lab.
Researchers
Thecla Schiphorst, Philippe Pasquier, Ulysses Bernardet, Steve DiPaola, Omid Alemi