Amy Shim, Peri Green, Abnell Comas

We were given four facsimiles of register pages from the Comédie-Française in Paris, a theater troupe commisioned by King Louis XIV in the late 17th century that is still active today. The pages revealed a number of interesting records from the time – like the price of coal, costumes, and food at the time – but we chose to focus on the more prominent notes on the ledgers: the types of tickets sold, the quantity, and the prices based on seating type. We expanded our thinking to outside of the four register pages we were given. What if we had been handed a hundred pages? A thousand?

By analyzing and sorting the data regarding the price, type, and quantity of tickets sold, the data could tell us about trends that illuminated economic inequality during the time period, which roughly spanned the 18th century. For example, an increase/decrease in the amount of cheaper tickets purchased over the years, when combined with household income trends in France during that time period, could tell us more about changes in popularity of theatre attendance and leisure spending among the lower class. Average ticket pricing could tell us more about levels of disposable income across classes and how the French economy had grown or suffered.

While natural language processing tools continue to make strides, we believe that the AI is not yet developed enough to be a dependable tool to extract the data necessary. The registers are handwritten in a manner that is even difficult for a human to decipher due to its layout. As an alternative, we will process the data with actual manpower (perhaps several UROPs could be hired!) to transfer the data on to spreadsheets. Though this process is labor-intensive and time consuming, it allows for better accuracy in ensuring the data is appropriately collected and categorized.

The tools we plan to build and use are data visualizations, so that the audience – historians and people interested in French income disparities – can easily identify and grasp trends without sifting through hundreds of pages of registers. We hope to address research questions about average income gaps in the French economy, particularly in the contentious years leading to the French Revolution.

Slides