News
Published on 23 January 2026
As we recently announced, the LSDB team is back up and running again thanks to an internal grant, which has allowed us to recruit two new Research Assistants: Ceilidh McCallum and Rose Ruhnke. You can find their professional bios on our main Team page, but here on the blog, we’re taking the opportunity to dive a little deeper into their academic backgrounds, research interests, and goals for their time on the project. Read on to get to know Ceilidh and Rose!
Ceilidh McCallum
Hailing from the Portland-Metro area, Ceilidh transferred to the University of Oregon in Fall 2024 after receiving her GED in 2021. A junior in the Cultural Anthropology program, Ceilidh is also minoring in Digital Humanities and Game Studies; she is set to graduate in the Spring of 2027.
LSDB Research Assistant, Ceilidh McCallum. Photo by Ceilidh McCallum.
Why Anthropology, Digital Humanities, and Game Studies?
“I was raised by my great-grandparents who were... Read More
Published on 21 January 2026
After a devastating loss of funding and a period of great uncertainty, I am very pleased to share some good news: the London Stage Database team has been awarded an internal grant that will allow us to resume active development! Our proposal was selected by UO’s Research Resilience Initiative for a Grant Termination Support award, which provides the resources needed to continue our most critical operations: training student researchers, extending the dataset, improving the site interface, and keeping users up-to-date on our work through our blog and social media channels. We are incredibly fortunate to have the support and partnership of multiple units at UO working together to keep this project humming along for the next 18 months, including the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Innovation, the College of Arts and Science, the Department of English, UO Libraries, and Central Information Services.
We... Read More
Published on 22 September 2025
As telegraphed in a recent post, we are releasing an exciting new feature this week that will help users surface play texts for many performances in the database. For newcomers to the eighteenth-century theater, we hope that seeing the published scripts will help bring these dramatic works to life. Specialist researchers will benefit from the ability to combine performance-driven data discovery with text mining methods in innovative ways.
Read on to learn more about how the new feature works and the many months of work that went into its design and implementation.
From Works to Witnesses
You may already be familiar with the “Related Works” feature, which identifies dramatic works that may have been acted at that specific performance event, as well as identified sources, adaptations, sequels, parodies, or abridgments. This feature has been part of the site since its launch in 2019, and it was largely the brainchild of research assistant Emma... Read More
Published on 22 September 2025
The London Stage Database will be down for about an hour this Thursday, September 25 while we publish a major feature update. The outage is planned for 3:30 p.m. Pacific time / 6:30 p.m. Eastern time. That’s 2:30 a.m. Friday for UK users.
Curious what will be changing? Read our recent blog post on “how we spent our summer vacation” and watch this space — we’ll be publishing a detailed write-up about the new feature before it launches.
As always, we apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience!
Published on 17 September 2025
Our Eugene-based team has been busy behind the scenes this summer! For months, we have been working on a series of interrelated improvements to the database and search algorithms underpinning our website, and preparing to roll out a new feature that supports research discovery by connecting performance events to printed texts of the plays staged. As these updates go live in the coming weeks, you may notice some changes to your search results and the data you export from the site.
Once all of the new data and code is deployed, we’ll package a new version of the project, publish it to GitHub, and archive it in Zenodo. As major updates roll out, we’ll post to this blog with a bit more information about what’s changing and why; technical types will find more detailed process documentation in our GitHub repository. For now, here’s a general overview of what to expect:
Patch 1.
Search index... Read More
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!