Is there a digital version of the tables from this particular book?
October 9, 2023 2:59 AM Subscribe
Long shot here, I think, but I'm looking for a digital version--or ideally, a database--of the tables from T. J. King's Casting Shakespeare's Plays: London Actors and their Roles, 1590-1642.
I work with a local Shakespeare company quite a lot, and one of the things that keeps coming up is doubling roles. (We try to keep our casts small, mostly for scheduling and logistics, so actors usually wind up playing two or three parts.)
My bible for figuring out this kind of thing is T. J. King's book mentioned previously. It's tremendously useful--it's mostly a set of tables breaking down which Shakespeare characters appear in which scenes in their respective plays, how many lines each has, etc.
However, it's all in text, and I'd like to try to automate at least the initial stages of figuring out which characters could be doubled. I've got some idea of how I want to try doing it, but it depends on having an electronic version of all the data. I could enter it by hand, but I'd rather avoid that if at all possible. (Because I know myself--I'll get bored and stop halfway through.)
Does anyone know if that kind of thing is available anywhere? (I thought about asking the author, but sadly he died back around 1994.)
I work with a local Shakespeare company quite a lot, and one of the things that keeps coming up is doubling roles. (We try to keep our casts small, mostly for scheduling and logistics, so actors usually wind up playing two or three parts.)
My bible for figuring out this kind of thing is T. J. King's book mentioned previously. It's tremendously useful--it's mostly a set of tables breaking down which Shakespeare characters appear in which scenes in their respective plays, how many lines each has, etc.
However, it's all in text, and I'd like to try to automate at least the initial stages of figuring out which characters could be doubled. I've got some idea of how I want to try doing it, but it depends on having an electronic version of all the data. I could enter it by hand, but I'd rather avoid that if at all possible. (Because I know myself--I'll get bored and stop halfway through.)
Does anyone know if that kind of thing is available anywhere? (I thought about asking the author, but sadly he died back around 1994.)
Best answer: Piracy is wrong. Pirates sometimes use Anna's Archive for their wrong activities, which makes their wrong actions easier.
Hey that reminds me: are there any reviews of the book available online that might have some of the data already transcribed for you? Maybe contact one of those writers and ask if they have a digital copy of the book, or else could comment on how they digitized the print version.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:30 AM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
Hey that reminds me: are there any reviews of the book available online that might have some of the data already transcribed for you? Maybe contact one of those writers and ask if they have a digital copy of the book, or else could comment on how they digitized the print version.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:30 AM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
I don't think you'll find the exact data from the book anywhere, but there are other datasets of the plays around like https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/kingburrito666/shakespeare-plays/
You could probably use that to generate most of the statistics you mention like number of lines per character or which characters are in which scenes.
posted by samj at 5:49 AM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
You could probably use that to generate most of the statistics you mention like number of lines per character or which characters are in which scenes.
posted by samj at 5:49 AM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
I don't have access to the details, but it looks like somebody has already figured all this out and published charts with role-sharing options for all of Shakespeare's plays, here. You can purchase access to it for 30 bucks.
posted by beagle at 10:28 AM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by beagle at 10:28 AM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Thanks, all. I managed to track down a copy of the book (again), and I think I might be stuck with manual data entry after all if someone else hasn't already done it--the tables aren't quite regular enough to make OCR likely to work. In the worst case, I can just do it on a play-by-play basis so I don't overwhelm myself. :)
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 11:10 AM on October 9, 2023
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 11:10 AM on October 9, 2023
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I mean, you need text converted to structured data, right? As dumb as this sounds, have you tried taking a picture with an iPhone, and seeing whether the built-in OCR works? Or turn the picture into a PDF and using an OCR tool on that? It might get you tables that could be copied and pasted into Excel, and then onward to the stars.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:26 AM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]