The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.0554  Monday, 25 February 2002

From:           Gabriel Egan <
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 >
Date:           Sunday, 24 Feb 2002 20:09:00 -0000
Subject:        The Non-Shakespearian Drama Database Co-Op

A number of SHAKSPERians have expressed interest in the
non-Shakespearian drama database (www.totus.org/nsdd).  The database
needs extra data about the plays it records, data which can easily be
supplied from Harbage's _Annals of English Drama 975-1700_. It is too
much work for one person to do for all 500 or so records, but a team of
25 individuals each working on just 20 records would get it done in no
time. Each person would receive a plain-text file of just 20 lines
length, each line looking something like this:

Anonymous (Elizabethan); Arden of Feversham; (1592)

This line records a name, a title, and a date of printing, in
semi-colon-delimited form. All the volunteer would do is find the item
in Harbage and add a few more semi-colon-delimited data, to make
something like this:

1591; Anonymous (Elizabethan); Arden of Feversham; (1592); c. 1585-1592;
Realistic Tragedy; Unknown

which represents the data filled in for these fields labels:

Harbage's-year; LION's author; LION's title; LION's date of copy text;
Harbage's-limits; Harbage's-type; Harbage's-auspices

where "LION" is the Literature Online database from Chadwyck-Healey,
used to make the existing version of the non-Shakespearian drama
database.

Volunteers would need access to the 1st or 2nd edition of Alfred
Harbage's _Annals_, but must not use the 3rd edition (1989, revised by
Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim) since this is known to be unreliable.

So, I'm appealing for volunteers willing to undertake this work to
contact me (
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 ). All contributors will receive due credit in
the database and the website built around it.

Gabriel Egan

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