Mapping the Moment: a spatio-temporal interface for studying performance culture, Nottingham, 1857-1867

The Mapping the Moment: Performance Culture in Nottingham, 1857–67 project (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/mapmoment) is an interdisciplinary collaboration between performance history and geography, which has as its aim the investigation of the complex connections between the different kinds and sites of entertainment, and between the people and communities involved in making and watching performance, in what was then the rapidly developing East Midlands town of mid-Victorian Nottingham. As questions of space, proximity and temporal relationships are central to the choice-making processes of both venue managers and potential spectators, so we sought to create a resource, based on a map of nineteenth-century Nottingham, that organised information about the town and its performance culture in ways that highlighted such connections and allowed us to explore the relationships between place, performance and audience within the town. Here we describe the creation of the resource and reflect on the development of o...