The Ladies Chained

Emerging Research Skills

As an independent academic project, two of my students are trying to learn Labanotation (a very complicated symbolic and concise way of recording dance movement) in a week. Half a week has passed and so far they have figured out the very basics. But they are now stuck on turns. More specifically, they need to figure out how to notate a pirouette. Here’s the outline of a conversation we had tonight:

Student: So we think it’s this symbol that does the spinning because we can read all these other ones. But what does it do?
Me: Well, it’s got a pointy part and is next to the arm bit. Maybe it signifies momentum in the arm that’s causing the turn?
Student: Oh man this is so awesome but so complicated. I wish there were more written on this than the like three web pages we found and showed you last week.
Me: Hmm. Wait a second. (Five seconds later.) Have you ever tried typing “labanotation” into Google and clicking on the first link that pops up?
Student: Yes! We did! Of course! Wait…
Me: You may find this interesting.
Student: Oh wow. We never saw this…
Me: Look! An entire section on turns! And jumps! And look at all these wonderful examples and diagrams!
Student: Okay, wow. This is. Wow. We completely missed this.
Me: I’m going to make fun of you for this and be sassy and sarcastic for the next minute now.

The ironic thing is that I just came back from a workshop talking about emerging technologies and teaching. You know, all that web stuff the kids are so used to using now: Google, for example.

Part of me is really, really glad that they didn’t find the comprehensive Labanotation tutorial four days ago. They spent the last few days essentially working from magazine articles and other incomplete introductions and puzzled out most of the very basic notation. With this knowledge they managed to choreograph and notate some basic things like forward and backward movement at different (spacial) levels.

They actually reminded me of the faster kids I’m teaching programming to. Basically they are learning this language by starting with learning the very basics and then taking example “code” and dissecting them. The lack of an absolute compiler does mean that they are more prone to error, but in the end they learned a lot from the process and definitely had a lot of fun learning this complex formal language.

The most interesting thing I got from this, though, is the fact that they missed what they were looking for even when they found it. They have certainly searched for “labanotation” on Google. They have certainly seen the page I found for them. However, they dismissed it. When I asked them why they couldn’t tell me; they just thought it wasn’t useful.

In some sense, it doesn’t feel useful. It’s a clump of text formatted with the very basics of HTML. Everything is in black and white. There is only the very bare minimum of whitespace that HTML imposes on the document. In fact, it was written in 1996. It references the Apple Newton as being the forefront of mobile technology. It is also written by a German man with an imperfect command of English in a direct, technical tone. Two teenage girls who like to dance and do things teenage girls normally do probably aren’t going to associate all these qualities with “useful information”.

Someone who has read a reasonable number of technical papers and who has typed large numbers of pages in either pure HTML or LaTeX and who has experience with finding information on things like USENET wouldn’t be fazed by the lack of color or fancy formatting. In fact, I associated “nicely organized information written in a content-based manner by a German computer scientist” with “this has got to be useful, if not awesome”.

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