London Stage Database (Web Resource)
Title: London Stage Database
Author: Mattie Burkert
Author: Todd Hugie
Author: Dustin Olson
Abstract: The London Stage Database website provides access to information about over 52,000 performance events documented in London between 1660 and 1800, based on the reference book The London Stage, 1660-1800 published in the 1960s, as well as a recovery of the related London Stage Information Bank developed in the 1970s. Users can search for specific actors, theaters, play titles, playwrights, and more, or they can download part or all of the data to conduct exploratory analyses. The user interface is designed to make the rich history of this data, as well as its many limitations, intuitively clear to those who interact with the site.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://londonstagedatabase.uoregon.edu
Primary URL Description: Landing page and keyword search for the London Stage Database website.
Secondary URL: https://londonstagedatabase.usu.edu
Secondary URL Description: Original URL for the London Stage Database, which will redirect to the new site.
London Stage Database - Database Code (Computer Program)
Title: London Stage Database - Database Code
Author: Todd Hugie
Author: Dustin Olson
Author: Derek Miller
Author: Mattie Burkert
Abstract: Code for cleaning, parsing, modifying, and loading data into the database. Versioned and repositoried in 2022.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://github.com/LondonStageDB/database-code/releases/tag/v1.0
Secondary URL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7328443
Access Model: Open Access
Programming Language/Platform: Python
Source Available?: Yes
London Stage Database - Website Code (Computer Program)
Title: London Stage Database - Website Code
Author: Dustin Olson
Author: Cameron Seright
Author: John Zhao
Author: Daniel Mundra
Author: Mattie Burkert
Abstract: This repository includes all the files needed to replicate the London Stage Database website on your server. Versioned and repositoried in 2022.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://github.com/LondonStageDB/website/tree/v2.1
Secondary URL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7328436
Access Model: Open access
Programming Language/Platform: PHP
Source Available?: Yes
The London Stage Database (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: The London Stage Database
Author: Mattie Burkert
Author: Will Daland
Author: Emma Hallock
Author: Todd Hugie
Author: Lauren Liebe
Author: Derek Miller
Author: Dustin Olson
Author: Ben R. Schneider, Jr.
Abstract: Recovered files, and documents and archival data used to revitalize the London Stage Information Bank, which was completed in the 1970s but had become technologically obsolete.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/all_datasets/77/
Secondary URL: https://doi.org/10.26078/0S6R-8E27
Access Model: Open access
London Stage Database - Data (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: London Stage Database - Data
Author: Todd Hugie
Author: Dustin Olson
Author: Mattie Burkert
Author: Emma Hallock
Author: Lauren Liebe
Author: Derek Miller
Abstract: Data for the London Stage Database, versioned and repositoried in 2022.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://github.com/LondonStageDB/data/tree/v1.0
Secondary URL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7328445
Access Model: Open access
From Manual to Digital: Women’s Hands and the Work of Eighteenth-Century Studies (Article)
Title: From Manual to Digital: Women’s Hands and the Work of Eighteenth-Century Studies
Author: Mattie Burkert
Abstract: Digital resources like the HathiTrust Digital Library, Early English Books Online, and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online are increasingly central to humanities scholarship, a trend that has only accelerated as academic jobs disappear, institutional budgets tighten, and an ongoing global pandemic limits travel and access to archives. These electronic resources are not simply a panacea in precarious times, however; they are the product of a global information economy that depends on uncredited, invisible, and underpaid labor. The academic humanities are complicit in exploiting and erasing these technology workers, as a growing body of investigative research has shown. This essay contributes a new case study of an offshore outsourcing project commissioned by and for eighteenth-century scholars: the digitization of The London Stage, 1660–1800 by China Data Systems Corporation in 1970. That electronic transcription, which continues to underpin the present-day London Stage Database, was performed by women keypunchers whose labor was systematically feminized, racialized, and devalued in advertisements and corporate media. Drawing connections to the rhetoric around projects like Google Books and the Text Creation Partnership today, I highlight the recurrent figure of the hand and its vexed role in policing the boundaries between agential and alienated labor. Turning to the period that gave rise to contemporary understandings of intellectual property, I conclude by examining a receipt recording three copyright sales between Susanna Centlivre and Edmund Curll. In this ephemeral manuscript, I find a story richly suggestive of how we might reimagine scholarly labor and knowledge work in our moment of technocapitalism.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2023.0036
Primary URL Description: Offprint of published article via Project Muse (subscription required)
Secondary URL: https://mattieburkert.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/burkert_secc_final-ms_website.pdf
Secondary URL Description: Preprint hosted on author website in accordance with publishing contract.
Access Model: Subscription only, with preprint available in open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Nobodies and Somebodies: Embodying Precarity on the Early Modern English Stage (Article)
Title: Nobodies and Somebodies: Embodying Precarity on the Early Modern English Stage
Author: Mattie Burkert
Abstract: This essay traces popular characters named “Nobody” and “Somebody” across the theatrical culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, beginning with the anonymous play Nobody and Somebody (1606) and moving through Henry Fielding’s The Author’s Farce (1730) to a series of prologues and epilogues performed throughout the 1740s and 1750s. I argue that this performance tradition encoded a critique of the ways credit culture abstracted identity, deferred agency, and replaced face-to-face social obligations with impersonal debt structures. The Nobody and Somebody phenomenon therefore offers a window onto early modern conceptualizations of precarity, as defined by Lauren Berlant: the interplay between the universal, existential vulnerability of being human and the specific instabilities and cruelties of life under capitalism. Ultimately, these figures reveal the power of the stage—a site that privileges embodiment, sensory experience, and material presence—to critique an economic system that insistently abstracts human life.
This article draws heavily on the London Stage Database as a source of research data and includes a detailed appendix collating the records in the database with other sources of evidence about a specific performance tradition.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000072
Primary URL Description: Article offprint via Cambridge Core (subscription required)
Secondary URL: https://mattieburkert.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/burkert-theatresurvey-preprint.pdf
Secondary URL Description: Pre-print hosted on author website in accordance with publishing contract
Access Model: Offprint: subscription only; preprint: open access via author website
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Theatre Survey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press