From Minstrels to Minstrelsy:
Linking Cities and Scholars with the Patrons and Performances Web Site
Jason Boyd
Editor and Project Manager

Patrons and Performances Web Site
Records of Early English Drama
150 Charles Street West #118
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON 
M5S 1K9

jasonaboyd@yahoo.ca

http://link.library.utoronto.ca/reed

The Patrons and Performances Web Site (PPWS) contains data derived from the print volumes of Records of Early English Drama (REED), a project whose ongoing aim is to find, transcribe, and publish external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642. Not only has this research shown the vibrant and long-standing history of dramatic activity concentrated in cities other than London – York, Chester, Coventry, Norwich, Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol, Newcastle upon Tyne, Bath, to name only a few – but the web site has provided a foundation for scholarly inquiry into the provincial inter-city touring routes, roads and playing spaces of professional troupes of minstrels, actors, acrobats and others.

In the autumn of 2005, the PPWS commenced an exciting collaboration with the Juba Project, whose aim is to compile the documentary history of the popular music-hall phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy and to track companies, individual performers and their routines as they toured from city to city in nineteenth-century Britain. Although the nature and range of the documentation available for minstrelsy shows markedly differs from that of medieval and Renaissance performances, Juba has been able, with minor modifications, to adopt the PPWS’s structure of interlinked databases.

This presentation will demonstrate the existing capabilities of the PPWS and its potential to transform scholarship into the history of theatrical practice. The collaboration with the Juba Project reveals the instrumental role humanities computing can play in making accessible and usable research into primary historical documents. The rationalized format and flexibility of the PPWS database can accommodate the data of theatrical practices from all historical periods while simultaneously being sensitive to historical specificity. The accessible template format of the database and the ability to access it and work on it from remote locations allows for real scholarly collaboration that is not constrained by geographical proximity or specialized computing skills.

Besides its ability to accommodate theatrical data from all historical periods, the potentiality of this computing project to encompass all stages of the scholarly process will also be discussed. A pilot project involving REED and the Internet Archive is a step towards being able to provide online the text from which this data is derived. In future, interested scholars could then engage in markup projects enabling the analysis of specific elements in these texts (i.e. dramatic representations of the legendary founders of individual cities). This work – along with other scholarship using the PPWS’s data – could then be represented as an online module (the ‘Shakespeare Featured’ section of the PPWS is an pilot example) accessible to students, teachers, scholars, and the interested public, thus incorporating the end stage of the scholarly process.