“Not Acted These Twenty Years”: What Eighteenth-Century Theatre Can Teach Us about Sustaining Digital Humanities

Launched in 2019, the open-access London Stage Database includes details about more than 52,000 theatrical performances recorded and advertised between 1660 and 1800. It is also a media archeological experiment—a recovery of a digital project that became obsolete almost as soon as it was completed in 1978. With a new Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the NEH, our team is extending the dataset and enhancing interoperability with Linked Open Data; developing new content and features to meet the emerging needs of users; and upgrading the technical infrastructure to (hopefully) avoid the fate of our predecessor. Along the way, we aim to preserve and extend the procedural rhetoric of the existing user interface, which foregrounds the layers of translation and remediation through which history becomes addressable as data, as well as the ease with which information is lost in the process. Of course, maintaining any space of collective cultural production—whether that be a physical playhouse, a theatrical repertoire, or a digital humanities project—requires constant, often invisible work by a network of individuals who care enough about the underlying material to continually transform it as times and technologies change. My talk envisions ways of performing this insight, through user experiences that emphasize not only the technical, but also the social dimensions of sustainability and preservation.

Time: Nov 7, 2024 04:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) | Meeting ID: 978 1418 5197 | Passcode: 858762