LibCrowds

johnjo
Looks like it might have been the accepted spelling.

Search for dovor at http://blplaybills.org and there are lots of playbills over a many years with that spelling.

Frisby

Thanks - good to know the derivation.

For info, here are a couple of links to playbills that show the play.

From blplaybills.org:

Hatmarket:
http://storage.googleapis.com/blplaybills.org/large2/lsidyv4045b355_477.jpeg

Covent Garden:
http://storage.googleapis.com/blplaybills.org/large2/lsidyv3fa2b3ff_383.jpeg

Same ones on the BL viewer:

http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_100022588919.0x000002#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=11&xywh=-975%2C0%2C4570%2C4688

http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_100022588811.0x000002#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=136&xywh=-915%2C-1%2C4616%2C4735

Looking at 'A chip of[f] the old block':

I searched for 'chip block' (without quotes) on http://blplaybills.org and found mutliple playbills with 'Chip of the old block' at Theatre Royal Haymarket between 1809-1815, 1816-1822, 1794-1819.

More interesting, the same play with the same spelling is on a playbills for Colchester, Covent Garden, Birmingham, Liverpool...

May be the accepted spelling at the time?

christian
Hi Christian,

Yep, I was concerned about the quality of the search using OCR text. I enhanced the images of the playbills significantly to give the OCR process a better chance of producing reasonable results.

It seems the text is good enough to provide something useful - but as you say it is imperfect.

Glad it was of help, and it will be interesting to see how it is received in your workshops.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

Frisby Thanks for the feedback. Good to know it's been of help. As you say the way the search works can be strange (giving all occurrences of Mrs) , but nice to see that perseverance paid off!

Just wanted to let people know about a site that tries to add text search to some of the BL playbill data that has been made publically available: http://blplaybills.org.

The catalogues covered are digitised volumes of theatrical English, Scottish, and Irish playbills between 1600 - 1902 (https://data.bl.uk/playbills/):

Playbills 1 - 107
Playbills 109 - 123
Playbills 126,129,131
Playbills 134 - 137
Playbills 139 - 143
Playbills 146, 147, 150, 151, 152, 161, 166, 168, 175, 178
Playbills 179 - 187
Playbills 193, 199, 204, 212, 213, 218, 225, 233, 234, 252
Playbills 262 - 264
Playbills 266, 276, 278, 280, 282, 285, 287, 291, 297, 306, 324, 325, 327, 329, 330, 348, 358
Playbills 400 - 404
Playbills 406 - 410
Playbills 412 - 417
Playbills 420
Playbills 424 - 427
Playbills 429

Playbills 126, 129 and 166 are currently missing.

General notes about the site:

• The text was generated using optical character recognition (OCR) software - so it can be quite rough
• You can search for phrases, and these do not need to be in quote marks; exact matches are returned first, then partial matches
• You can view/download a hires version of the playbill
• You can view the catalogue the playbill belongs to in the BL viewer
• You can copy the OCR text to the clipboard
• You can filter the results by date, theatre, location, catalogue

Hope it proves helpful.