by Cameron Cook
The Rebecca J. Holz series in Research Data Management is a monthly lecture series hosted during the spring and fall academic semesters. Research Data Services invites speakers from a variety of disciplines to talk about their research or involvement with data.
This September, Mattie Burkert, a PhD student from the Department of English, gave a talk entitled “Recovering the London Stage Information Bank (1970-1978): Data Preservation Lessons from an Early Humanities Computing Project”.
You can find the archived presentation slides on MINDS@UW.
Mattie’s talk focused on her work of piecing together what remains from the London Stage Information Bank, an early digital humanities computing initiative from the 1970s that sought to transform the printed text The London Stage into a data bank queryable by researchers. Her work touches on the rapid media obsolescence and the misconceptions of data preservation of the time, both of which can seen as lessons for today’s digital humanities and digital scholarship worlds. Her talk also gave a brief view into the project as it stands, the tools and techniques she has used for reconstructing lost data, and the difficulties faced as she continues her project.