News
Published on 12 November 2026
The logos of the Sphinx and Manticore software companies imposed on their namesakes from Greek mythology. Graphic created in Canva by Frida Heitland and Mattie Burkert.
Have you conducted a search on our site in the past five years? If so, your results were collated by the search engine Sphinx, which was used by lots of sites like ours over the last decade. But when it comes to technology, the only constant is change. For months, our team
has been working behind the scenes to make the switch to Manticore, another open-source search engine.
Manticore has the same DNA (so to speak) as Sphinx, but it incorporates more modern features that will let us continue to improve LSDB search moving forward. We are excited to clean up parts of our code base that were hand-coded to perform search tasks that are built into Manticore, which will make our code easier to read, maintain,... Read More
Published on 05 November 2026
The LSDB is very much a labor of love, and labor comes up in all kinds of ways when curating data and managing a database. The same is true for the original London Stage project and the impressive and weighty (literally and figuratively) volumes it produced.
All eleven books of The London Stage, 1660-1800. Photo by Mattie Burkert at Memorial Library Reference Collection, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Beginning in the 1950s, a team of theater historians worked on a project to compile historical sources surrounding the world of London’s theater, which they published as The London Stage, 1660-1800. (For the story of how those books were digitized starting in the 1970s, then lost, then recovered and turned into the LSDB of today, check out our History page.)
Together with UO grants administrator Holly Lakey, Professor Burkert sleuthed out and purchased these volumes for the LSDB team from various rare booksellers around the U.S. One... Read More
Published on 29 October 2026
If you follow our blog, you know we love talking about the LSDB online. Next year, we get to do it in person — and in our beloved City of Roses! The American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS) is holding its annual meeting next April in Portland, Oregon, just a short drive up I-5 from our headquarters in Eugene.
Oregon section of Lewis’, Clark’s, and Meriwether’s 1805 map of North America from the Library of Congress
We are thrilled to share the good news that faculty, librarians, graduate students, and undergrads from our team will be participating in the program in multiple modalities:
conversing with peers at a roundtable on AI in the digital humanities;
presenting a poster on digital humanities pedagogy;
delivering papers on panels dedicated to “eighteenth-century collaborations” and “performing sociability”;
and even playing a tabletop roleplaying game about the East India Company.
We’ll share more details here as the conference schedule... Read More
Published on 21 October 2026
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!
Published on 21 October 2026
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
Published on 15 October 2026
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