Open-source cultural engagement platform

Melodramatick

Melodramatick is a reusable platform for building cultural user engagement sites. It provides a general template that can be adapted to specific domains, with deployed proofs of concept including opera, ballet, and concert-based variants.

Current example deployments

These are current themed deployments in the Melodramatick ecosystem.

About

Melodramatick is built around a simple “tick” mechanism: users mark the works, performances, or events they have attended. The name is deliberately playful, the same template can be re-themed into domain-specific “tick” sites such as the live examples above.

The template provides reusable functionality for cultural audience engagement sites, including structured records of works and performances, browsable tables, user profiles, attendance histories, and gamified features such as top-list completion.

These engagement records also create analysis potential. Aggregated tick data can help explore patterns across works, venues, creators, and event types. The model can be applied across performing arts genres, adapted for narrower one-off cultural partner projects, and potentially extended to wider GLAM engagement contexts.

For developers

The Melodramatick codebase is available on GitHub and can be adapted to create new deployments.

Institutional and project support

Melodramatick is being developed within MVLS Shared Research Facilities at the University of Glasgow. DisCouRSE funding is supporting its development for dRTP leadership training activity and associated cultural engagement pilots. DISKAH support is helping to frame the work as a digital research infrastructure use case for arts and humanities engagement data.