Presentation

Our project aims to make the archives of La Comedie-Francaise more accessible to researchers and academic people by offering a visual interface to the data at hand. Since reading the original documents present several challenges ranging from a language barrier to the unclarity of the writing and the general composition, our approach is based on several steps leading to the transfer of these facsimile to the digital world.

Our extraction method to go from facsimile to data is via an algorithm/software. The algorithm would scan handwritten text and translate it into digital text to be stored online (on servers or cloud). Additionally, it would also be able to translate the digital text into other languages in order for it to be accessible to researchers from different backgrounds. While technical challenges to this algorithm exist, we have researched existing softwares that have this capability so it is definitely possible.

The final interface would be a website which displays the original document next to a schematic plan corresponding to the theater in the document. The user would be able to see a 1-to-1 highlight of a section in the original document to its corresponding section in the visualization. Our research shows that the company played in several theater depending on each period of time (ie :Théâtre de la République,Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, Studio-Théâtre), so various theater plans would be available. We imagine the user would also be able to visualize these trends and patterns over time, and filter for different attributes to refine the query to their interest.

We envision that this tool would facilitate the research work conducted by academics by making it easily accessible and by providing them with an estimate of the ticket prices and benefits done by the Comedie-Francaise within a certain time period. Moreover it would give a general sensibility about the popularity of La Comedie francaise and thus by tracking how many seats were reserved by night.