News

Research Spotlight: London Stage Data in a Transnational Context

Today’s guest post is by Jeffrey Ravel, who is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at MIT and the author of two books: The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Seventeenth Century France; and The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791. Professor Ravel co-founded and co-directed the Comédie Française Registers Project (CFRP) and is a leading researcher at the intersection of digital humanities and theater history. The London Stage Database (LSDB) has significantly enhanced the study of the eighteenth-century London stage. The project will undoubtedly continue to shape scholarship on English theater of the period, as the LSDB team adds more data and creates new ways for interested users to access this information thoughtfully. The success of the LSDB is matched in a French eighteenth-century context by the Comédie-Française Registers Project, an enterprise with which I have been associated since its founding in 2010. Similar projects exist... Read More

Adaleah Loves Handwritten Text Recognition

Editor’s note: Welcome to the fourth installment in our series of undergraduate research spotlights, the London Stage Data-Sitters Club! Not sure what that means? Check out our brief orientation to the series here, and read all posts to date under the category: London Stage Data-Sitters Club. Today’s post is by Adaleah Carman, who recently graduated from University of Oregon with a major in Sociology and a minor in Digital Humanities. Her post explores the potential of new handwriting recognition models that could make it easier for projects like LSDB to incorporate manuscript sources into searchable datasets and collections. – Mattie Burkert I grew up right in between the time when schools taught cursive as an essential skill, and then abruptly stopped teaching it at all. Thanks to my calligraphy phase in middle school, I have light knowledge about how to read cursive, but many people my age and younger do not. Archivists and humanities researchers are... Read More

Sadie Tells the ‘Truth’ (about Theatrical Memoirs)

Editor’s note: Welcome to the third installment in our series of undergraduate research spotlights, the London Stage Data-Sitters Club! Not sure what that means? Check out our brief orientation to the series here, and read all posts to date under the category: London Stage Data-Sitters Club. Today’s post is by Sadie Mordan, a rising senior in the School of Journalism and Communication and a Digital Humanities minor at the University of Oregon. Sadie is in the early stages of a thesis project examining memoirs through an ethical lens and asking what it means for a memoir to be socially responsible. – Mattie Burkert Life Writing and Authenticity The celebrity memoir is one of the most popular subgenres of memoir. This form of life-writing can be revealing, providing a sense of intimacy between a reader and an A-lister. But it is important to remember that a celebrity with any sense will never publish... Read More

Ceilidh and the Too Many Harlequins, Part 2

Editor’s note: Welcome to the second installment in our new series, the London Stage Data-Sitters Club! Not sure what that means? Check out our brief orientation to the series here, and read all posts to date under the category: London Stage Data-Sitters Club. Today’s post is the second of two by LSDB Research Assistant Ceilidh McCallum, and it picks up where “Ceilidh and the Too Many Harlequins” left off last week. – Mattie Burkert While my DH capstone project on Harlequin afterpieces focused on performances and plots, another question evolved alongside the research process: Who were the most popular Harlequin and Columbine involved with this set of afterpieces? At the same time that I was beginning my capstone research, I was working on a project for the LSDB, gathering biographies of notable people from A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800, a... Read More

Ceilidh and the Too Many Harlequins

Editor’s note: Welcome to the first installment in our new series, the London Stage Data-Sitters Club! Not sure what that means? Check out our brief orientation to the series here, and read all posts to date under the category: London Stage Data-Sitters Club. Today’s post is the first of two by Ceilidh McCallum, whom you might already know as one of the LSDB’s Research Assistants and who (like all the Data-Sitters) just completed the capstone course for the University of Oregon’s undergraduate Minor in Digital Humanities. – Mattie Burkert The interactive data visualization below represents the theaters where The Beggar’s Opera was staged between 1728 and 1800, highlighting the Harlequin afterpiece that was most frequently performed alongside John Gay’s comedy at each playhouse. It ‘paints a picture’ of the cultural relevance of different plots and which were selected for each location. Visualization created by Ceilidh McCallum using Processing; translated into JavaScript using... Read More

Introducing the London Stage Data-Sitters!

I’m a huge fan of the Data-Sitters Club: a site full of fun, informative tutorials and reflections on digital humanities research methods, all centered on the classic YA lit series The Babysitters’ Club. Each “book” (blog post) pays homage to an installment in the original series: BSC #1 Kristy’s Great Idea becomes DSC #1 Quinn’s Great Idea, and so on. A rotating cast of core Data-Sitters and guest bloggers write about their experiences gathering, processing, analyzing, and interpreting a shared corpus — in this case, the BSC novels — offering workflows, resources, and problem-solving techniques that readers can learn from to tackle their own humanities text mining projects. Visit their website to learn more About the Data-Sitters’ Club Inspired by (and with permission from!) the Data-Sitters themselves, I’m delighted to announce a new series on this blog, which we’re calling the “London Stage Data-Sitters’ Club.” Over the coming weeks, we’ll be featuring guest posts from... Read More