Using the facsimiles from the Comédie-Française Registers’ Project, our team seeks to craft a multi-modal and interdisciplinary learning experience. With a visual, interactive, and gamified experiences, all types of users will be able to learn about 18th century Parisian actors, their theatre, and so much more. The facsimiles we received documented four years of ticket sales. Each document detailed generally four categories of information: amount of money made, seat types and seat prices, date, and the plays put on. We proposed retrieving this information in many ways: from conventional means like crowdsourcing, manual extraction, optimal character recognition to other more interesting approaches like machine learning and image capturing. Because the information size is so small, we will simply hold the information in a database.

With this information available, we believed it would be interested to explore correlations between: year and cost, play and cost, and also to explore changing costs over time. In our brainstorming and designing, our team had two distinct and clear foci: multi-modality and leveraging what the user already knows. We wanted to do something visual that allows diverse representation for the diverse ways the ticket information was represented throughout the years. In addition, we wanted to contextualize this information in a practical and relevant way. With these emphasizes, we target any number of casual users. With our design, we pose and answer behavioral, sociological, historical, and economic questions about 18th century France.

We did this by first proposing the use of interactive visualizations like parallel axis grids and bar graphs to explore correlations. Then, we would also have information about ticket sales, cost, and seating overlaid their respective theatres and locations, very similar to how we purchase tickets online today. Lastly, we would explore the possibility of gamification. To contextualize the ticket sale information, we could assign the user a character of a certain socioeconomic level and allow the character to explore the theatre, buy tickets with his/her money available, and see a play.

Using our designed model, we hope to reach the people who do not know much about the French theater but are interested to know more. We want to make the originally dense and dry information more interactive so it is more appealing to the general public. The goal is to educate people on the history of the French theater and lead them to try to learn more about the 18th century France. We also envision the information to be used by educators to make students more involved in their learning.

As the information is set up for the layman to access and explore easily, we thought it would be best to display the data as a website and an app. The app would focus on the interactive aspects of the information displays and allow the users to manually manipulate graphs and theatre views to fit their specific interests or needs. Additionally, an application implies informal use and facilitates casual browsing of information during users downtime or commutes. The website would be a more formal extension of the application, with similar visuals but perhaps a wider and more comprehensive display of the data and statistics.