Arts-Area

Help us transcribe the history of theater at Yale!

Ensemble at Yale homepage
May 5, 2017

Decompress from end-of-the-year stress by helping create a database of Yale theater history with Ensemble@Yale! This new tool leverages the power of crowdsourcing to identify and transcribe titles and dates of plays as well as the names of actors, directors, playwrights, set and costume designers, etc. from historical programs in Arts Library Special Collections dating back to 1925. Ensemble@Yale, inspired by the original Ensemble project from NYPL Labs, is an experiment that aims to transform historic programs from Yale’s archives into searchable text. Rather than reproducing all of the words in a digitized document, as with optical character recognition (OCR), crowdsourced transcription relies on human judgment to pull out features of interest to scholars and create structured data. Someday this data will allow researchers to answer questions such as "Who has played Hamlet onstage at Yale?"

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