From Cultural Tourists to Shakespeare Fans: The Stratford Festival and the Construction of Audience Authors
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it