Interview with Dan Granata and Nick Keenan, Creators of Chicago Theater Database
Last November, I had the opportunity to correspond with actor Dan Granata and sound designer Nick Keenan, creators of the Chicago Theater Database. The CTDB is a community-generated and community-supported project very similar to Chicago Art Magazine in its mission to be a comprehensive resource for information about Chicago’s arts—in the case of CTDB, theater. According to the CTDB website (www.chicagotheaterdb.com), it “seeks to be a comprehensive repository for the who, what, when, where, and how of the theatrical community: a reference for the present, a record of our collected history, and a sustainable resource for building the next stage.”
KB: What is the status of your project? What is the next milestone?
DG: The status is “ongoing development”—although the pace of development has slackened off considerably to be sure. Nick and I have both been working on a number of shows, which sucks up a lot of time and energy. And there’s the sticky problem that he and I are both teaching ourselves how to program Ruby on Rails as we go, so when we run into an issue that’s beyond our ken, it takes us awhile to work through it. Moreover, as we’ve worked on this project, we are finding more and more resources out there that do some of what we want to do, or seem to do much of what we want to do but aren’t well-implemented, so we’ve been reassessing what the best way forward is. We certainly believe in the project, and think it adds so much value to the community of theatre artists of which we are members, but we’re also wary of following in the misguided footsteps of so many well-meaning arts advocacy/development organizations who plunge headlong into building something from scratch—trying to be the “end-all, be-all”—without seeing what’s already available or what could be achieved by pooling our resources. In a way, we’re trying not to fall into the same trap we see theatres and theatre artists fall into all the time: wasting energy recreating the wheel when there’s a guy selling spokes down the street.
NK: In terms of internal structure of CTDB and arts organizations in general, I think we’ve all woken up to the fact that there are unmet needs out there—career development, organizational development, better packaging of our work for a social media-savvy audience—that MUST be addressed as, especially in theater’s case, existing funding models dry up. Dan and I woke up to that a year ago as artists and came up with what we thought was a top-level solution: a big database of everything, telling us things about the community, and would tell the community where to go. Unfortunately, in practice, it doesn’t work so directly. People don’t necessarily connect with the data, even if they contribute it. They need it broken down and delivered to them in a trusted and timely on-demand kind of way. For example, one of the initial goals of the database was to coordinate opening nights of shows around town so that the theater community as a whole had more surface area with the press. This year, largely due to economic considerations, this problem got much WORSE instead of better, and something like 40 shows opened in the last week of October, far too many for the press community to cover effectively. These theaters had the data, but didn’t have the flexibility to take effective action.
The next logical step came very fast and surprised us: we got every Chicago theater company’s attention, and we realized that these companies’ needs are actually completely overlapping, disorganized and unarticulated. It is hard to serve that kind of mishmash without really clarifying the needs first. The next “phase” of the CTDB, if you can call it a phase, was not actually about finishing the software: it was about putting the community in contact with us and with each other, face-to-face.
The CTDB is definitely fulfilling some immediate needs. Our website remains the best resource I know of for actually learning about and contacting each theater company in Chicago—which is a huge boon to the hundreds of young artists who flood the community each spring to help them connect with existing companies and missions rather than try to remake the wheel.
The next pressing need I think will come out of a face-to-face meeting that the entire community is having via the League of Chicago Theatres (http://chicagoplays.com) and the Storefront Theatre Summit. Those face-to-face conversations are generating a ton of alignment. One of these days we’ll find in that alignment an immediate reason to break through the stumbling blocks of the project—and ideally, a model for funding it without burdening the community—and light it up.
KB: On our end, chicagoartmap.com/map, we ‘ve got hard-working people scouring the city’s hundreds of galleries for event information. What about you guys? How do you get your data? And what about your website? Who built it?
DG: The initial data was compiled by me into an MS Access database for my own research purposes. I started writing about my findings on my blog, which got Nick’s attention, and he suggested turning it into an online resource. As for the current site, Nick built it from scratch in hard coding using Ruby on Rails, a popular web programming language.
We really only have one stumbling block ahead of us: making a user-friendly input interface. We’re nearly there, but we’ve been looking for User Interface and AJAX programmers who will really know what they’re doing to get that rolled out. We had a basic back-end interface in place, but it proved so inefficient as it was hanging the site. Before that point, we actually were having great luck with a core group of 40 people in the community who were uploading info. It was really chugging along as a habitual user-generated content gathering machine, and we created about 15,000 records before we ran into scalability problems.
KB: This will be a sort of doppelganger type of post—you guys must have been thinking along exactly the same lines as Stephanie and I: “We’ve got to organize the scene! We need a database!”
DG: Again, it really started as a personal thing. I wanted to write about some issues I saw at large in the community (“We do a lot of Tennessee Williams,” “Companies open shows on the same days which makes it hard for reviewers,” “There are a lot more theatre companies in town than you think,” etc.) but I realized I didn’t have any hard data. So I started collecting information (initially just the shows for that upcoming season, 2007-2008) from the largest theatres. Then I got curious about other stuff—theatre locations, length of runs, budget size—so I started collecting more and more. What started as an Excel spreadsheet became an Access database. I started writing about having a complete list of theatres, and the data I was compiling on my blog, and then Nick got in touch and suggested putting it online. My reaction was, “Sounds like a great idea, but I have no idea how to do that.” Nick said, “We’ll figure it out.” So from there we started having conversations about what would be helpful for individuals and companies. We both have histories working inside theatre management, and in both the technical and performance side of making theatre in Chicago, so these early conversations were all over the map: zooming out 20,000 feet to talk big picture (“What do we hope comes out of this?” “How would this information be used to plan a season or a company’s future?”) and down to the tiniest details of the data (“What if an actor gets married and changes his/her name—how do we keep info from before and after the name change together?” “How do we record one-act festivals or collections of short works?”).
NK: Dan has said it all. One thing I learned early on with social media projects like this is that you never force anything. If you let the need guide you, you’ll end up with a much more robust architecture than if the idea springs out of your mind, Zeus -> Athena style. In that context, it makes sense that the project is dormant right now, but if the conversation surrounding it was also dormant, I’d be much more alarmed. What has been great this entire time is just how many people we continuously are able to meet, help in their data-gathering operations, get ideas from, and how much of the actual theatrical landscape we’ve been able to survey. It was a much more complex environment than we originally thought… and we knew from the get-go that we were talking about 300 companies and over 10,000 artists.
On a side note, one of the many projects that Dan and I share due to our partnership on the CTDB is our theater company, the side project (http://thesideproject.net). We’re positioned to make the side project (a venue in Rogers Park off the Jarvis stop) a hub of grassroots theatre artist activity, and one idea that has consistently come to the table is providing some rotating gallery space in our venue for emerging visual artists—perhaps doing some simple gallery showings that tie-in thematically with our shows during the day, early evening, off-nights or late-nights after our performances. I feel like we could do a better job of connecting with the right players in the visual arts community in Chicago, and well, you guys just walked up and knocked on our door.
KB: Setting up artists with theatre space would be, I think, pretty easy. We love cheap WordPress templates: we could get a “real estate” template, put in images, and the artist could contact theaters to connect.
NK: With some minor tweaking, it is conceivable that the structure of the CTDB could be ported over to other industries. We’ve already thought about the Chicago improv community, but because theater is so multi-disciplinary, it’s conceivable that once we get this system working, we can get it working for other fields and find ways to get them to talk to each other.
KB: It really is funny how similar, we and our projects are: 2 guys trying to make a comprehensive theater artist database for Chicago, 2 girls trying to make a comprehensive visual artist database for Chicago. I’m excited to see what comes of your project! Thanks for all the info and best of luck!
Supplementary Info: Chicago Theater Database
What is the CTDB?
The Chicago Theater Database seeks to be a comprehensive repository for the who, what, when, where, and how of the theatrical community: a reference for the present, a record of our collected history, and a sustainable resource for building the next stage. By giving artists the ability to organize and analyze their information through online collaborative systems, we believe that we can make the business of making theater easier.
Who Runs the CTDB?
Initiated by actor Dan Granata and sound designer Nick Keenan in Fall 2007 from collected data, it will ultimately be a community-generated and supported service. This site has just moved into Beta – with data viewing open to the public and contributors working behind the scenes testing, collecting data, and developing the user-driven content interface. At the time of this writing, there are 75 contributors to the CTDB, with more being added every week. Check the header for the current count, and click around the links above to see what everyone’s working on.
How can I add my information to the CTDB?
Thanks for your interest in the CTDB! Ultimately the Chicago Theater Database is going to be an open-source resource for companies and individuals, so you’ll have the ability to update your information whenever you want. Although we’ve got the database open for viewing right now, we’re not fully open for business quite yet. We’ve invited a core group of about 80 testers to start playing with adding in data and trying, frankly, to break the site so that we can make it stronger. Letting anyone and everyone sign up and take ownership of their information is a major goal for us, and we’re getting closer to that goal. So while we can’t give everyone access to input data right now, we are working hard to deliver on the CTDB’s promise as a tool for actors, designers, directors, writers and other theater-folk to get a handle on what’s going on around town, connect them to their colleagues, and give them tools to make theater-making easier. Currently, we’ve got two big projects: on one hand, we’re developing cool features for reporting, searching, and sorting the data that we have on the site – for instance we have in the “quick search” menu features which will show you all the contact and policy information for companies which accept directors’ proposals, script submissions, and headshot/resume submissions, all in one place. You can also track the latest contributions from our team of beta testers by clicking on “Most Recent Contributions.” We’re training this team of volunteers that who will help us continue building the store of information on the site – who can respond to requests (like yours) from companies who want to get their organization’s details fleshed out, build out underdeveloped parts of the site like venue information, and help us fill in information like cast and crew data on the shows running this season.
Nick Keenan and Dan Granata are the organizing parties behind this project, and while we (mostly Nick) have some skills in the programming department, we’re still theater folk learning as we go along. And working theater folk at that – we’re building this between our day jobs and our theater commitments! If you’d like to help us with the projects above and others like it – there’s no programming experience necessary, just an enthusiasm for the project and some regular time in front of a computer – please drop us a line. We’re adding beta testers every week. And, as always, you can keep abreast of the developments at our newly consecrated blog http://chicagotheaterdatablog.blogspot.com.
