LibCrowds

Hi from central Kansas. Do you have a preference as far as what gets included in a single box?

I'm guessing that if a play has an alternate title, that it would get its own box--so that the transcription/future search term is specific. And that punctuation should be excluded.

i.e.

Tonight, from the celebrated
Msr. Fallon & Co.
Presenting for One Night Only
[THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE]!!!
or
[He's Got His Tight Pants On]!

[x] = characters within a single box

Am I on the right track?

vhhancock This is somewhere where we certainly need to improve our documentation but we're leaning towards including everything in the box and handling any alternative titles or punctuation issues during post processing (e.g. checking for the word 'or' and semi-colons).

One reason being that we want to avoid the instructions becoming too complex and risk scaring people off who might not be familiar with cataloging issues, or just don't want to wade through pages of instructions before starting.

Another is that these marking tasks are essentially just a way of generating a series of transcription microtasks. In these tasks we will have different boxes for things like "Alternative title", or "Prefix", "First Name", "Surname" and so on, for people. Hopefully that will become a bit clearer once we publish our first transcription projects.

Hello from central London, and thanks for your really useful feedback!

We do want you to include all the bits of the title in one, with the thinking that some titles aren't distinctive without their subtitle. We'll use Open Refine (http://openrefine.org/) to clean up variations in punctuation so it's ok if people include or don't include it. We're working on tailored help pages and that's probably a good place for that level of detail.

I'd used 'subtitle' to indicate alternative titles in the task instructions. It's tricky to update the instructions on live tasks, but for future ones, would a version of the text below be helpful?

'Draw rectangles around the titles of plays featured on the next performance date. When you're happy with the outline, choose the green tick to save it. Most playbills list more than one play for an evening, so mark all you can see. Please include subtitles (alternative titles, like 'or the something or other') where they exist. Ignore any performances on past or future dates. You don't need to include song titles. Press save/submit when you're finished marking up a page.'

mia We aren't expecting songs to be included, as they're generally listed as part of a larger performance. Animals tend to be listed with their name rather than the title of a work, but that may change as we work on other playbills from other places and periods.

Our rule of thumb for now is 'if you're not sure, include it and we'll work it out later'. We're consulting with academic historians, but we'd also like to hear from you. Have you come across types of performances that you weren't sure about? What information would researchers want to search on?

So with this one...

http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_100022589092.0x000002#?cv=144

...I've omitted the (two? three?) interludes, as they don't appear to be "plays" (especially when compared with the evening's main entertainment, i.e. "Damion and Pythias; Or the Force of Friendship" and "Katherine and Petruchio"). The Ode is a poem, rather than one or more characters depicting a plot, and the other item(s) are clearly songs.

Of course, if the main entertainment was the Ode, then its inclusion in our group of assigned playbills would mean that I would include it. As Alex has suggested elsewhere, I can see the danger of overthinking this. "The play's the thing," yes?

@vhhancock 'the play's the thing' is a very good way of thinking of it!

Is a Venetian statute in various poses (?) a performance? Spotted on http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_100022589092.0x000002#?cv=228&r=0&z=37.6513%2C979.8031%2C1684.6974%2C854.3937

Do tableaux count as a 'performance'? This example is from 1848, Plymouth's Theatre Royal

I've noticed a comment from a participant asking 'series of acts rather than plays?' - we're counting a single act from a play as a performance, but we should probably find a way to note when it's an excerpt.

Some more 'what counts as a performance' conundrums in this Nottingham volume! Acrobatics? Acts with horses? Playing music on glasses (please no)?

A question raised in a participant's comment - does a poem (in this case, an epithalamium) count as a performance?

http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_100022589024.0x000002#?cv=260&c=0&m=0&s=0&xywh=-558%2C1685%2C3630%2C2322 )

Other questions in comments - does a grand military march count? Recitations?

As well as circus acts, someone's spotted a 'Transparent Orrery' and Astronomical Lecture!

I just spotted this comment from Tuesday: 'One of the acts is a celebrated and astonishing Gun Trick'!

Someone wrote 'wasn't sure whether to include the 'odds and ends'' - in some ways that sums it up!

We want to be sure that any work you do helps make the playbills easier to find and understand, so we're carefully planning a solution for recording performances that aren't classically 'works' like plays. If you have any ideas in the meantime, please let us know!

I think all of the above would count as "performance"! Maybe not "drama," but people went to the theatres to see these presented in public and audiences did not necessarily draw such a distinction between a play and something like tableaux.

A lot of theatre scholars have expanding ideas of what “performance” is, and I do tend to apply the term liberally. In something like a tableau, actors still appear in costume, follow a series of poses, and enact some kind of scene. There is scenery, props, story, etc.--just not dialogue. Also, since tableaux were often seen in melodramas, it would make perfect sense to see these on a continuum.

I don't know how rigid the categories are, but "other" seems a bit non-descript for things that were heavy draws for audiences. Could they be reclassified later?

Thanks for your comment! Maybe we could have a generic 'transcribe performance' task, and a second 'categorise performance' task. Each task might attract different people, or people might do one or the other depending on their mood at the time.

I'm mindful that earlier projects (e.g. NYPL) reported that making tasks too complicated reduced participation levels.

That's a good point that too many categories would make it too complicated (and I imagine produce uneven results). As someone who is more fascinated by the variety of what is on the bills, I'm just eager that they don't all get lumped together, since often that variety is what brought spectators to see the main offering.

Bumping this thread up as it's a useful overview for people new to the project. It also gives you a sense of how complex these historical documents are!