Live demo:

http://tinyurl.com/CFRPtimeline

Project Team

Keeley Erhardt, Julia Guo, Ali Finkelstein

Research Question

How can we visualize the trends of theater (specifically at Comédie-Française) over time? That is, did certain plays, writers, or actors become more popular over time? Do these trends correlate with any world events or national events in France at the time?

How would you analyze and present the data?

We chose to create an interactive timeline that displays each play that premiered at Comédie-Française as events on the timeline. The user can scroll through the timeline and view specific plays in more detail, including the genre of the play, the writer, and the actors.

What kind of scholarly tools would you be building?

We hope to build more scholarly tools for analysis that can align the play premiere events with historical events at the same time. Furthermore, we hope to add a tool to zoom in on a specific time period so that scholars can focus on a specific time period, as well as a tool to examine trends in plays, actors, and authors.

How would you draw a public audience into the project?

We hope to draw a public audience into the project with this interactive timeline because it is much more visually appealing and digestable than a table of dates. We hope to engage the audience by first presenting them with a grand image of the theater and then give them the freedom to explore and navigate through the timeline.

What might be some of the technical challenges for your approach?

We can improve technically by adding more information to each play (maybe by pulling a summary of each play, or ticket sale information from the API), as well as figuring out a way to make the events on the timeline appear less crowded and busy. The reason it is this way is because there are several plays that premiered around the same time, so they clump together on the timeline.