News
Published on 22 August 2025
Starting today, users of the London Stage Database might notice that downloading your search results requires you to first click a button that says “I’m human.”
We’re using Google’s Recapcha service to implement this feature, which is necessary to protect the website infrastructure from the bot attacks that have overloading our server and taking the site down several times a day. Also known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, these bot swarms are the cause of the frequent outages you might have noticed if you’ve tried to use our site over the past couple of weeks. HUGE thanks to Analyst Programmer John Zhao, Research Data Management Librarian Erin Winter, and Special Projects Librarian Franny Gaede for an amazing all-hands response this week once we realized what was happening.
Hopefully, with this fix in place, you can wrap up your summer research using LSDB without any further interruptions!
Published on 05 August 2025
Due to planned server maintenance, the London Stage Database website may experience periodic outages tomorrow, August 6, during business hours (U.S. Pacific Daylight Time). Everything should be back to normal by Thursday, August 7. Thanks for your patience!
Published on 18 July 2025
LSDB Research Assistant extraordinaire Emma Kaisner recently put the finishing touches on an incredible interactive timeline of notable backstage dramas of the long eighteenth century. Not only does she delve into the commentaries these plays offered on the entertainment industry, gender roles, and authorship, but she also uncovers the fascinating histories of their performances using the London Stage Database and other digital humanities resources.
Emma’s timeline is deeply researched, lively, and engaging — I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you have any issues loading the embedded content below, you can also open the timeline in a new tab.
Published on 02 July 2025
Our last blog post shared a feature story about the London Stage Database from CAS Connections, a publication of the UO College of Arts and Science. ICYMI:
The Show Must Go On: Groundbreaking digital humanities project brings theater history to the public
One of the images in that story was taken by Nate Kersey, class of 2025 (congratulations, Nate!). He joined me, Michele, and Erin at UO’s Knight Library for a visit to Special Collections and Archives, where we had the chance to check out eighteenth-century editions of plays by Eliza Haywood, Colley Cibber, Thomas Southerne, John Dryden, Hannah Cowley, and Susannah Centlivre, among others. Some of the photos from that day will be making their way on to the main website as we add more content, but for now, here’s a sneak preview of some of our favorites:
From left: Erin Winter, Michele Pflug, and Mattie Burkert examine an eighteenth-century book in University... Read More
Published on 02 July 2025
Here at UO, CAS Connections is an online-first magazine that showcases innovative research, teaching, and public scholarship from the College of Arts and Sciences. The LSDB team has known for months that the writers at Connections were putting together a piece about our project and the new work enabled by the NEH grant. When Michele, Emma, and I first sat down for an interview with writer Jenny Rice, though, we were expecting to provide a bit of background and human interest for an otherwise ordinary press release. None of us could have predicted how the grant termination in April would change the narrative. I’m grateful to Jenny and her whole team for putting together such an in-depth story and multimedia package about the project’s impacts so far, and our hopes for the future. Click through the preview below to read on — and be sure to check out the bonus feature... Read More
Published on 07 May 2025
As was previewed in an announcement earlier this spring, the LSDB team is retiring the Legacy Search feature from website. Read on to learn more about what this feature did, why it’s being retired, and what to do if you realize you need to use it in the future.
What was the Legacy Search?
Legacy Search was a feature that allowed users to reproduce searches conducted between the initial site launch in July 2019 and a major upgrade in May 2021. While the underlying database records were unchanged, this upgrade changed the way users’ queries were relayed to the database, which in turn affected the results for many searches.
Introductory text on the now-retired Legacy Search interface. See a snapshot of the page taken using the Wayback Machine.
Background
LSDB was launched in July 2019 with a PHP/MySQL-based search function. When a user ran a search, the terms of that search were translated into a... Read More