From Cultural Tourists to Shakespeare Fans: The Stratford Festival and the Construction of Audience Authors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the Stratford Festival of Canada has relied consistently on high quality productions of classical, contemporary, and musical theater, its approach to marketing itself has changed dramatically. The first decade of the 21st century has provided new challenges to both recruiting and maintaining audiences. By 2008, it became apparent that the appeal of cultural tourism as a means of drawing playgoers to a destination Shakespeare site was no longer enough. To attract new audiences, the Festival began a number of digital initiatives including a multimedia app, a social media version of Romeo and Juliet, and several online games. This article examines some of these initiatives, focusing on what they reveal about how the Festival saw (and sees) its audience(s). More than simply play-goers in search of Shakespeare's cultural capital, the Festival addressed its audiences as fans of Shakespeare and of the Festival. It provided opportunities for them to engage productively rather than passively. In so doing, the Festival contributed (and continues to contribute) to an understanding of Shakespeare as the subject not just of study, but of fandom.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".