ARTeFACT Movement Thesaurus

FAIN: HD-50992-10

University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)
Bradford Bennett (Project Director: October 2009 to August 2012)
Susan L. Wiesner (Co Project Director: October 2009 to August 2012)
Rommie Stalnaker (Co Project Director: October 2009 to August 2012)

The development and testing of a tool and accompanying thesaurus to make film searchable for dance movements.

The ARTeFACT Movement Thesaurus is a continuation of the ARTeFACT project which was developed at the University of Virginia as a means of enabling research into movement-based arts, specifically dance. The Movement Thesaurus is a major step toward providing access to movement-derived data. By using motion capture technologies we plan to provide a sophisticated, open source tool that can help make film searchable for single movements and movement phrases. The ARTeFACT Movement Thesaurus will contain over 100 codified dance movements derived from Western concert dance genres and styles from which we can develop algorithms for automatic search capabilities in film. By bringing together engineers, movement specialists, and mathematicians we will forge ahead to break new ground in movement research and take one step closer to the creation of an automated means of mining danced texts and filmed movement.