News

New feature: Print Witnesses

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... Read More

Scheduled downtime this week

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!

How we spent our summer vacation

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

New: Recapcha protection for data downloads

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!

Possible site outages tomorrow, August 6

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!

Behind the Scenes: The Fascinating History of Rehearsal Plays

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.