Miguel Escobar Varela, Ph.D.

*My first name is pronounced Migel, with a silent 'u'. Following Mexican naming conventions, I have two last names: Escobar Varela.

I am an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore and deputy director of the Centre for Computational Social Science and Humanities. I also serve as an Associate Editor of Computational Humanities Research. I study the changing landscape of Southeast Asian cultural heritage by combining fieldwork with computational methods (such as NLP, computer vision and network analysis). My aim is to understand how the production and reception of cultural forms have changed over time, in areas such as the performing arts, print media, and digital spaces. Besides academic publications, I develop public-facing projects, which include museum installations and digital platforms. As a scholar, my larger ambition is to contribute to nuanced conversations about cultural heritage in both policy and the public sphere.

My datasets, software code and machine learning models are available at: HuggingFace, GitHub and ORCID. I can be reached at X, BlueSky, LinkedIn or at m [dot] escobar [at] nus [dot] edu [dot] sg.

My book Theater as Data (University of Michigan Press, 2021) is available in print and as an Open Access edition via Fulcrum. The book explains how computational methods can be used to study the performing arts. A web companion includes videos, datasets and sample code.

Public-facing Projects:

My PhD dissertation on contemporary Indonesian theatre was awarded the Wang Gungwu Medal for the best dissertation in Humanities and Social Sciences (2015), and an honorary mention in the Award for Excellence in Digital Theatre and Performance Scholarship 2016 by ATHE. It is available at wayangkontemporer.com

The Contemporary Wayang Archive (CWA) is a digital archive of new versions of Java's oldest performance tradition: wayang kulit. This archive includes full-length video recordings, performance data, translations, and notes by the editors and translators of how the performances were received in their original context.

The Interactive Wayang Screen (with Daniel Sim) is a Tangible User Interface for the Contemporary Wayang Archive that uses traditional components of the Javanese wayang kulit puppet theatre and Arduino sensors. It received the award for Best Contribution to Creative Communication by ACM Creativity and Cognition 2017.

The Biomechanical analysis of Javanese dance (with Luis Hernández Barraza) is a portal that uses biomechanical measurements (such as range of motion) to analyze differences among character types in Javanese dance. Character typology is a central concept in Javanese dance discourse and this project aims to bring together a biomechanical analytical toolkit and Javanese intellectual traditions of dance scholarship.

The Digital Wayang Encyclopedia is a data-driven online dictionary of the main characters and storylines of Javanese wayang kulit theatre. It includes network visualizations and quantitative analyses of character relations.

Research papers

M. Escobar Varela. 'The People and Places of Experimental Theatre Scholarship: A Computational Overview.' in Theatre Survey Vol 64, Issue 1 (2023).

M. Escobar Varela and L. Hernández-Barraza. 'Digital Dance Scholarship: Biomechanics and culturally-situated dance analysis' in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol 35, Issue 1 (2020).

L. Hernáz-Barraza, C.H Yeow, M.l Escobar Varela. 'The Biomechanics of Character Types in Javanese Dance' in Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, Vol. 23, Issue 3 (2019)

M. Escobar Varela. 'Towards a digital, data-driven wayang kulit encyclopedia: histories, experiments and epistemological reflections' in Indonesia and the Malay World Vol. 47, Issue 137 (2019).

M. Escobar Varela. 'The dramaturgy of theatre fieldtrips: studying cultural relativism in situ' in Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance Vol. 24, Issue 2 (2019).

A. Schauf and M. Escobar Varela. 'Searching for hidden bridges in co-occurrence networks from Javanese wayang kulit' in Journal of Historical Network Research Vol. 2, No 1 (2018), pp. 26-52.

M. Escobar Varela and Nala H. Lee. 'Language documentation: a reference point for theatre and performance archives?' in International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media Vol. 14, No 1 (2018), pp. 17-33.

M. Escobar Varela and Gea Oswah Fatah Parikesit. 'A Quantitative Close Analysis of a Theatre Video Recording' in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol. 32, No 2 (2017), pp. 276-283.

M. Escobar Varela. 'The Archive as Repertoire: Transience and Sustainability in Digital Archives', in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2016)

M. Escobar Varela. 'Heirlooms of the Everyday: The Material Performances of Slamet Gundono' in Theatre Research International, Vol. 41 No. 1 (2016), pp. 53-69.

M. Escobar Varela. 'Hacking and Rehearsing, Experiments in Creative Tinkering' in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 01 (2016), pp. 68-77

M. Escobar Varela. 'Interoperable Performance Research: Promises and Perils of the Semantic Web' in TDR, Vol. 60, No. 3 (2016), pp. 136-147.

M. Escobar Varela. 'The essay/ontology workflow, challenges in combining formal and interpretive methods' in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2016), pp. 84-94.

M. Escobar Varela. 'Wayang Hip Hop: Java's Oldest Performance Tradition Meets Global Youth Culture' in Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2014), pp. 481-504.

M. Escobar Varela and Paul Rae. 'International, A Dialogue' in Contemporary Theatre Review, Special Issue: The Politics, Processes and Practices of Editing, Vol. 25, Issue 1 (2015).

M. Escobar Varela. 'The Intermedial Interrogation of Memory' in Performance Research, Vol. 17, Issue 3 (2012), pp. 33-38

M. Escobar Varela. 'Nieuwe-mediafestivals als Voedingsbodem voor Diversiteit' [New Media Festivals as Seedbeds for Diversity] in Boekman Tijdsdschrrft, Vol. 83 (2010), pp. 88-92.

Book chapters