Buried treasure: rediscovering the Lord Chamberlain's collection of plays
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Grant Holder:
Professor Jacqueline Bratton
The project began upon the long-overdue cataloguing of the Lord Chamberlain's collection from 1852 onwards. The pilot covered the decade to 1863. The collection for that period numbers about 3000 plays, including for example the British versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin and many farces and pantomimes with political implications around issues such as first-wave feminism. Cultured mid-Victorians agreed with G. H. Lewes that 'drama is extinct as literature' and ignored the new performance culture; these plays have therefore never been considered in either literary or social histories. The project aimed to make them more available for study, and to that end included key-wording of texts for catalogue searching, an innovation in the British Library Manuscript Catalogue.
A spin-off project has been the transcription of interesting unpublished texts and their publication on the Royal Holloway website, which is ongoing.
| Project start date: 2005-09 | Project end date: 2008-12 |
Subject domains:
Era(s):
Country/region(s):
| Methods used | Category |
|---|---|
| Audio interaction (asynchronous) | Communication and collaboration |
| Cataloguing and indexing | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Collating | Data analysis |
| Content analysis | Data analysis |
| Documentation | Strategy and project management |
| Iterative design | Strategy and project management |
| Searching and querying | Data analysis |
| System quality assurance and code testing | Strategy and project management |
| Security planning | Strategy and project management |
| Textual interaction (asynchronous) | Communication and collaboration |
| Textual interaction (synchronous) | Communication and collaboration |
| Collaborative publishing | Data publishing and dissemination |
| General website development | Data publishing and dissemination |
| General project management | Strategy and project management |
| Audio-visual interaction (synchronous) | Communication and collaboration |
| Manual input and transcription | Data capture |
Funding sources:
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Content types created:
Dataset/structured data
Software tools used:
Javascript, Microsoft Word, CSS, Acrobat Distiller
Source material used:
The Lord Chamberlain's Collection. The British Library is the repository for all the manuscripts submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's Office between 1824 and 1968, the end of dramatic licensing. The manuscripts are often unique copies of unpublished plays; many are in poor condition.
Digital resource created:
The resource created was a contribution to the British Library Manuscripts Catalogue, and has no separate URL from theirs. Ten years of entries (several thousand) were created. This involved identifying and describing the plays in the collection from 1852-1863, and contributing key words for all these texts which are also searchable in the catalogue.
Access to digital resource:
Open Access
Data Formats created:
Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
Publications:
A special issue of the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Winter 2009, is devoted to the project and associated research outcomes.
Institutions affiliated with this project:
| UK HE institutions involved: |
|---|
| Royal Holloway |
| University of London |
| UK HE institutions involved: |
|---|
| The British Library |
Project staff and expertise:
| Principal staff member: | Jacqueline Bratton, Kathryn Johnson |
|---|---|
| Other staff: | Postdoctoral researcher(s) / Research assistant(s) |
| External expertise: |
| Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) of record | Jacky Bratton |
| Title | Buried treasure: rediscovering the Lord Chamberlain's collection of plays |
| Record created | 2010-09-30 |
| Record updated | 2010-09-30 15:57 |
| URL of record | http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/3647 |
| Citation of record | Jacky Bratton: Buried treasure: rediscovering the Lord Chamberlain's collection of plays. <http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/3647> created: 2010-09-30, last updated 2010-09-30 15:57 |