Crowdsourcing Content Guidance A Commons-Based Approach to Harm Reduction in Theatre

Abstract

Content guidance empowers people to make informed decisions. When theatre organizations do not provide content warnings from the impetus of creative work, they subject artists with Madness/mental illness, neurodivergence, sensory differences, and survivors of trauma to unsafe working conditions. By crowdsourcing content guidance, we can practice harm prevention and harm reduction from the beginning of any creative process, building a culture of care and consent. This would also reduce the labor of crafting warnings from scratch in the long term.

In 2021, the author of this article devised a living, crowdsourced repository for playscript content warnings for use by the community of my theatre conservatory. Building upon the strengths and deficiencies of that first iteration, as well as existing crowdsourcing tools such as DoesTheDogDie.com and The StoryGraph, this paper proposes an updated iteration: a tag system integrated within a custom web database and, ideally, script libraries such as the New Play Exchange. Features would include author-approved and reader-submitted content guidance, a list of content tags to filter one’s search, hidden spoilers, intensity tiers, automatic summaries, and full aggregate data. This paper provides a conceptual presentation of the tag system’s utility, functionality, and gaps for further consideration.