News

…and we’re back!

Thanks to quick work from the amazing UO Central IT team, the LSDB website is patched, secured, and back online. Special thanks to PHP dev extraordinaire John Zhao, and to open source developer Remi for pushing out emergency patches while out of the office on vacation. Happy searching!

Presently Having Problems

The LSDB website is temporarily unavailable while we apply a critical security update. No data has been affected, but we’re taking precautions to address recently announced vulnerabilities in PHP. We’ll announce here and on Bluesky when the site is back up. Thanks for your patience! In the meantime, please enjoy this classic from XKCD:   Alt text is too long for WordPress, so here’s a transcript, via ExplainXKCD: [A tower of blocks is shown. The upper half consists of many tiny blocks balanced on top of one another to form smaller towers, labeled:] All modern digital infrastructure [The blocks rest on larger blocks lower down in the image, finally on a single large block. This is balanced on top of a set of blocks on the left, and on the right, a single tiny block placed on its side. This one is labeled:] A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003

Meet the latest addition to our team!

As you may have seen from the latest blog post, our NEH grant funds have been restored. This has given the LSDB a chance to keep moving forward — and to grow our team! Today, we are pleased to introduce you to the newest graduate Research Assistant, Frida Heitland. Continue reading to learn about Frida’s research interests, their background experience in digital humanities, and why they’re excited to be working as Data Manager for the LSDB this year. Frida Heitland Originally from Germany, Frida came to Eugene in 2022 to start their PhD with the English department at the University of Oregon. Their work combines approaches from the environmental humanities with comics studies.   Selfie by Frida Heitland. Why Comics Studies? “I earned my bachelor’s degree in Anglophone Studies in Germany, because I loved English literature, but the department also offered me first glimpses into literary theory and cinema studies. That breadth was exciting. When the department... Read More

Funding update: NEH grant restored!

If you follow this blog and/or the London Stage Database project, you are probably already aware that we lost our funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities a year and a half ago, as part of the DOGE Service’s mass cancellation of grants to humanities researchers and organizations. Earlier this spring, we learned that a federal judge had ordered the government to restore the terminated awards, but the actual process of applying for reinstatement and receiving updated award documents took all summer. In fact, there are many awardees still waiting to hear back from NEH about applications they submitted in July and August. Our project is, fortunately, officially back in business and in a position to move forward with our work starting immediately, thanks in large part to bridge support from the University of Oregon that kept us afloat during this long period of uncertainty. Cross-stitch gifted to our... Read More

Research Spotlight: London Stage Data in a Transnational Context

Today’s guest post is by Jeffrey Ravel, who is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at MIT and the author of two books: The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Seventeenth Century France; and The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791. Professor Ravel co-founded and co-directed the Comédie Française Registers Project (CFRP) and is a leading researcher at the intersection of digital humanities and theater history. The London Stage Database (LSDB) has significantly enhanced the study of the eighteenth-century London stage. The project will undoubtedly continue to shape scholarship on English theater of the period, as the LSDB team adds more data and creates new ways for interested users to access this information thoughtfully. The success of the LSDB is matched in a French eighteenth-century context by the Comédie-Française Registers Project, an enterprise with which I have been associated since its founding in 2010. Similar projects exist... Read More

Adaleah Loves Handwritten Text Recognition

Editor’s note: Welcome to the fourth installment in our series of undergraduate research spotlights, the London Stage Data-Sitters Club! Not sure what that means? Check out our brief orientation to the series here, and read all posts to date under the category: London Stage Data-Sitters Club. Today’s post is by Adaleah Carman, who recently graduated from University of Oregon with a major in Sociology and a minor in Digital Humanities. Her post explores the potential of new handwriting recognition models that could make it easier for projects like LSDB to incorporate manuscript sources into searchable datasets and collections. – Mattie Burkert I grew up right in between the time when schools taught cursive as an essential skill, and then abruptly stopped teaching it at all. Thanks to my calligraphy phase in middle school, I have light knowledge about how to read cursive, but many people my age and younger do not. Archivists and humanities researchers are... Read More