By Meghana Bhat and Karleigh Moore

Thought Process

In order to convert facsimile information into usable data, our group needed to decide what our end goal was to be and to identify an audience that would find our work useful. We decided that an interactive and visual project that allowed users to engage with and explore the history of particular actors would be a useful tool for students of theatre, present day actors and their managers, and owners of theatres.

We wanted to make a project that incorporated information about actors and actresses who have performed for the Comedie-Francaise in Paris. Information to include would be related to the types of roles they played and the genres of plays that they performed in. We could incorporate data regarding ticket sales, profits, dates of performances, and even the type of seats that were filled on each night of their performance to gauge their popularity, discover possible strengths and weaknesses of certain aspects of their performances, and identify other trends. We could incorporate data concerning important events (such as wars, famines, and social upheaval) that occurred around each performance to perhaps explain drops or increases in ticket sales that might be independent of an actor or actress’s performance but still related to his or her success or failure.

After identifying these factors, we brainstormed ideas for methods of how to accomplish our project goals. First, we would need a digital mode of access to the facsimile data that described ticket sales, types of seats that sold, plays performed, performance dates, and the names of the actors and actresses that performed in each production. In addition, we would be interested in consulting with a theater expert to help us classify each of the plays performed according to their genres. Second, we would need to acquire data concerning important historical events as well as data that describes the economic trends in Paris for each of the years that the Comedie-Francaise was in operation.

How to Extract the Data From the Facsimile Documents

Our team identified several methods that we could employ to actually retrieve information from the paper documents of the facsimiles and convert it into digital data. Our project could use the following methods:

  • OCR/Digital text recognition software
  • Crowdsourcing/CAPTCHA
  • Manual Labor
  • Division of parts of facsimile images into categories based on type of information/format

How to Store, Organize, and Present Data

We decided that using a database would be the best way to store and organize all of this data. With a database we could easily cross reference and compare data sets. Examples of possible comparisons would include:

  • The number of dates a particular play was performed.
  • How ticket prices related to the day of the week of the show.
  • How number of tickets sold was affected if certain actors were performing.
  • The types of seats that were bought if certain genres were playing.
  • If ticket prices/sales changed due to times of war or economic depressions/booms

Additionally, we would want to process our data sets so that we could represent the information with line graphs, bar graphs, and timelines where the user could adjust the parameters according to their research interests. Another interesting way to represent attendance numbers and seat purchases by type would be to have a graphic representation of the theater itself and to populate the seats in the graphic as the user adjusts the parameters described earlier in this write-up. Both methods would be visually interesting and have different mechanism for user interface but convey essentially the same information.

Audience

This tool would be interesting and useful for academics and lay people alike. Such a tool could help a PhD student with thesis work in art history, theatre, or even economics and it could also be of use to a high school student working to complete an essay about theater. But this could also be an entertaining and enlightening interface to include at theatre locations with an interest in displaying a bit about their theatre’s history — sort of like a museum exhibit. In that line of thought, this interface would probably also be a welcome addition to art/theatre museums.

Research Questions

For the students and historians, this tool could be used educationally to discover the successes and failures of certain actors or actresses or plays. For actors and actresses, this could give them more insight on what role or play to participate in for their specific acting style, under different circumstances, as well as the effects of certain play performances on acting careers. Additionally, managers in theatre could use it to determine which actors and actresses would be more optimal to offer roles to.