I am the Principal Investigator and Project Director for the London Stage Database, which was recently awarded a 2024-2027 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. For updates on our team’s activities, you can subscribe to our blog or connect with us on Bluesky: @londonstagedb.bsky.social.
In its current form, the website recovers and revitalizes the London Stage Information Bank, a 1970s-era humanities computing project. That team created a database of the performance records in The London Stage, 1660-1800 (Southern Illinois University Press, 1960-1968), an 8,000-page, eleven-book reference work that includes information about performances of plays, prologues and epilogues, afterpieces, pantomimes, instrumental music, singing, and dancing in London’s public theaters in the long eighteenth century. Regrettably, the Information Bank — which was created with the support of about $200,000 (the equivalent of roughly $750,000 today) in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Billy Rose Foundation, and others — fell into technological obsolescence after only a few years, and it has long been thought irretrievably lost.
In recent years, my team recovered much of the Information Bank‘s damaged data and code. An essay about the early history and startup phase of the project appears in Digital Humanities Quarterly (Fall 2017). With support from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities and other funders, we were to develop a more robust data model, transform the data into preservation formats, and create a web-based interface to allow users to search the database or download the full dataset for exploratory statistical research. Our 2020 white paper and the NEH public query page provide further details about the project aims, development process, and impact.
Reviews:
- Kalle Westerling, Reviews in Digital Humanities
- Fiona Ritchie, ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
- Renae Satterley, Renaissance & Reformation
Popular Press:
- The Data is Plural Podcast, Season 1, Ep. 2
- Nightingale: Data is Plural Visualization Challenge
- The Economist: “When Was Greatness Thrust upon William Shakespeare?”
Scholarly Mentions and Citations:
- Sissi Liu, Derek Miller, Erin B Mee, Kate Elswit, and Sarah Bay-Cheng. “Digital Scholarship Roundtable: The State of the Field.” Theatre Journal 76.2 (2024): E20.
- Emily C. Friedman, “Afterword: Novel Knowledge, or Cleansing Dirty Data: Toward Open-Source Histories of the Novel,” in Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture, edited by Ileana Baird (Palgrave, 2021): 356.
- Julia H. Fawcett, “David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity by Leslie Ritchie (review),” Theatre Journal 73.1 (2021): 114.
- Clarisse Bardiot, Performing Arts and Digital Humanities: From Traces to Data (Wiley, 2021): 107.
- James Harriman-Smith, “What James Boswell Tells Us about 18th-Century Acting Theory,” Literature Compass 17.10 (2020): 1.
- David O’Shaughnessy, “A New Stage for Eighteenth-Century Irish Theater Studies,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 49 (2020): 357.
- Jeffrey S. Ravel, “The Comédie-Française Registers Project: Questions of Audience,” in Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Studies, edited by Simon Burrows and Glenn Roe (Voltaire Foundation, 2020): 148.
- Matt Burton, Matthew J. Lavin, Jessica Otis, and Scott B. Weingart, “Digits: Two Reports on New Units of Scholarly Publication,” Journal of Electronic Publishing 22.1 (2019): note 130.
- Chelsea Phillips, “Bodies in Play: Maternity, Repertory, and the Rival Romeo and Juliets, 1748-51,” Theatre Survey, 60.2 (2019): 228.
