Research
The Philadelphia Playbills Project is looking for help transcribing the names of theaters, actors, performances and more on 19th century playbills from the Furness Shakespeare Theater collection at the University of Pennsylvania libraries Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Thousands of such playbills exist at Penn and other library collections around the country but, due to the large amount of text they contain, they are largely uncataloged and the information on them is unavailable to researchers interested in the history of the theater, art, and social history these playbills document.
The playbills on this project describe performances from America's oldest Theaters in Philadelphia. The works performed range from adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin to an evening advertised as a combination of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and the appearance of a "Living Elephant." The playbills also document the people who performed these plays, such as Edwin Booth, brother of Lincoln's assassin (though a loyal supporter of Lincoln himself), or Laura Keene, the first woman to become an influential theater manager in New York and Philadelphia, who was performing the night of that assassination and held the dying Lincoln in her arms. With the help of Zooniverse transcribers, the PPP will produce a previously unavailable data set that will support new research about the American Theater, develop and refine methodologies for generating such data in the future on a larger scale with other playbill collections in the future.