People
Principal Investigator: Helen Bailey (Department of Performing Arts and English, University of Bedfordshire)
Co-Investigators: Simon Buckingham Shum (Knowledge Media Institute, Open University), Michael Daw (Manchester Computing/Access Grid Support Centre, University of Manchester), Sita Popat (School of Performance & Cultural Industries, University of Leeds), Martin Turner (Manchester University Visualization Research Group).
Bailey and Popat have established dance/technology research portfolios, investigating choreographic collaboration via digital and communications technologies. Daw’s Collaborative Technologies group at Manchester Computing supports the UK AG user community. He has collaborated with Kelli Dipple on AG performances. Daw works closely with Dr Martin Turner, (Manchester Visualization Research Group, University of Manchester), who collaborated on AG dance projects with Bailey. Daw and Buckingham Shum have collaborated since 2004 on the JISC VRE Memetic project, which forms the core enabling technology in this proposal. The Open University leads the software development of the Compendium concept-mapping tool, which has an active international user community, while Buckingham Shum is a leading researcher in Design Rationale (approaches to capturing reasoning in design processes) and Scholarly Hypermedia (applications of hypermedia to research processes).
Biographies
Investigators
Helen Bailey is Principal Lecturer in Dance within the Faculty of Creative Arts, Technology & Sciences at the University of Bedfordshire. Her research interests focus on the interrelationship between dance, new media, visual technologies and e-Science. She is Head of CARD (Centre for Applied Research in Dance) which focuses on practice-led research in dance with an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration. She is Artistic Director of professional dance-theatre company Ersatz Dance with whom she has created a series of nationally and internationally touring live works, dance films and site-specific installations.
Simon Buckingham Shum is a Senior Lecturer in Knowledge Media at the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute. He leads the Hypermedia Discourse research programme, which focuses on the theory, design, coding and evaluation of practical tools for knowledge workers to visualize and analyse dialogue and argumentation. His book Visualizing Argumentation is the first devoted to the field. He is a co-founder of the Compendium Institute, which supports an active user community and annual workshop around the Compendium knowledge mapping tool, being deployed in e-Dance. His research in Scholarly Hypermedia & e-Science has led to the new Cohere web-based knowledge mapping tool, shortly to be released.
Michael Daw (University of Manchester) is team leader within Research Computing Services, Head of the Access Grid Support Centre (which supports UK users of Access Grid), project manager of the Collaborative Research Events on the Web (which offers persistent research access to events such as conferences, seminars and workshops) and project manager of the e-Infrastructure for the social sciences (which aims to enable easier access to e-Science technologies for social scientists). He has sat on numerous programme committees and has presented widely on aspects of collaborative and distributed environments. 
Sita Popat is Senior Lecturer in Dance (New Technologies) at the School of Performance & Cultural Industries, University of Leeds. Her research interests centre on dance in digital and new media contexts, and over the past few years she has choreographed for dancers, robots and digital ‘sprites’. Her other research projects include Projecting Performance and Emergent Objects – both of which use performance frames to investigate how humans interact with new technologies. She is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media.
Martin Turner (University of Manchester) is a team leader for visualization within Research Computing Services.
Developers:
Michelle Bachler is the developer of the Compendium and Cohere knowledge mapping tools from the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute. She brings industrial expertise in Java, Web development, XML and databases. She has worked with Simon since 2002 on the CoAKTinG e-Science project, the ECOSENSUS e-Social Science project, with the Manchester team on the Memetic project on which e-Dance is building directly, and most recently on the Open Sensemaking Communities project.
Anja Le Blanc
Andrew Rowley
