The Philadelphia Playbills Project

FAIN: HAA-255999-17

University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6205)
William Noel (Project Director: January 2017 to May 2021)
Laura E. Aydelotte (Co Project Director: July 2017 to May 2021)

A proof-of-concept effort to transcribe and disseminate textual data from a collection of theater playbills documenting 19^th-century American theater history.

The Philadelphia Playbills Project (PPP) takes materials from the archive and transforms them into Linked Open Data. The project will be based at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and collaborate with the New York Public Library and the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab. It will use a sample set of 19th century playbills filled with performance information from America's oldest theaters to test approaches to generating data from these materials, including publically crowdsourcing transcriptions using the Ensemble software produced by the NYPL. The PPP will then test workflows for transforming this data into RDF (Linked data). The project will produce a previously unavailable data set that will support new research about the American Theater, develop and refine methodologies for generating such data in the future on a larger scale with other playbill collections, and lay the grounds for future collaborative work with a conference on Performance History in the Digital Age.

Associated Products

Philadelphia Playbills Project Homepage (Web Resource)
Title: Philadelphia Playbills Project Homepage
Author: Laura Aydelotte
Abstract: This is the Wordpress site that acts as the landing page for the Philadelphia Playbills Project. It contains a general description of the project, a description of the data produced by the project, and the program for the capstone conference.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://philadelphiaplaybills.com
Primary URL Description: Philadelphia Playbills Project landing page

Philadelphia Playbills Project Conference (Film/TV/Video Broadcast or Recording)
Title: Philadelphia Playbills Project Conference
Writer: Laura Aydelotte
Director: Dennis Mullen
Producer: Laura Aydelotte
Abstract: This is a video produced of the capstone conference for the Philadelphia Playbills Project, "Digital and Archival Approaches to Theater History," which took place at the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania January 17 and 18 2019. Note that some speakers are not included because they requested that their presentations not be taped.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRuJiM6TsJk
Format: Digital File
Format: Web

"The Philadelphia Playbills Project Year One" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "The Philadelphia Playbills Project Year One"
Author: Laura Aydelotte
Abstract: Presentation on the Philadelphia Playbills Project at the capstone conference for the project. See "supplemental materials" for the powerpoint for the presentation.
Date: 01/18/2019
Conference Name: Digital and Archival Approaches to Theater History

"Scrapbooks Material and Virtual: Putting the Pieces of the Performance Together Again" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "Scrapbooks Material and Virtual: Putting the Pieces of the Performance Together Again"
Author: Laura Aydelotte
Abstract: Paper for a seminar on scrapbooks and Shakespeare at the 2018 Shakespeare Association conference. The paper discussed the work of the Philadelphia Playbills Project in relation to the Furness Shakespeare Libary collection of scrapbooks, comparing the way people of the past collected playbills, actor images, and more and pasted them together in scrapbooks to document a performance they had seen, with the virtual "scrapbooking" at work in connecting the playbills data produced in the project with images of theatrical ephemera in the Penn Libraries collection.
Date: 03/29/2018
Conference Name: Shakespeare Association of America

"The Philadelphia Playbills Project: Bringing Philadelphia's Theater History to Life" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "The Philadelphia Playbills Project: Bringing Philadelphia's Theater History to Life"
Author: Laura Aydelotte
Abstract: Presentation at the Philobiblon Club of Philadelphia.
Date: 02/13/2018
Conference Name: Philobiblon Cllub

Datasets for the Philadelphia Playbills Project (Script)
Title: Datasets for the Philadelphia Playbills Project
Writer: Laura Aydelote
Director: Laura Aydelotte
Producer: Laura Aydelotte
Producer: George Gordon
Abstract: Two Linked Open Data sets in json-ld format available on GitHub. One was produced from the structured transcriptions of the sample set of 700 Philadelphia Playbills. The other is data for the digital images in the Furness Theatrical Image Collection at Penn Libraries.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://github.com/upenn-libraries/playbills

Theater Materials from the Furness Shakespeare Library (Exhibition)
Title: Theater Materials from the Furness Shakespeare Library
Curator: Laura Aydelotte
Abstract: Pop up exhibit displayed during the project capstone conference, "Digital and Archival Approaches to Theater History." The exhibit consisted of 37 items from the Furness Shakespeare Library, and the Edwin Forrest collections at the University of Pennsylvania, and 5 additional playbills from the German Society of Pennsylvania. The exhibit displayed the 19th century physical items that were the focus of the digital project, including a variety of playbills, theatrical posters, actor images, props, and costumes. Items also included material related to actors and theater culture, such as the gloves once believed to have belonged to Shakespeare, which the actress Fanny Kemble gave to Philadelphia collector Horace Howard Furness, and the remains of Edwin Forrest's copy of Shakespeare's first Folio which was burned in a fire, but remains preserved under glass in Penn's collection. (See exhibit images in supplemental materials).
Year: 2019

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