Reviewed by:

• Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680–1793 / Données, recettes & répertoire. La scène en ligne (1680–1793) ed. by Sylvaine Guyot and Jeffrey S. Ravel
• Susan L. Fischer

THIS DIGITAL-ONLY, open-access, bilingual volume focuses on the ongoing work of the Comédie-Française Registers Project, an international initiative that investigates how digital humanities methods might “facilitate, enrich, and affect the study of the theatrical past,” as Sylvaine Guyot and Jeffrey S. Ravel state in their introduction (3). The Comédie-Française Registers Project springs from the incredibly complete manuscript and print records of the Comédie-Française preserved in the Bibliothèque-Musée at the far side of the Palais-Royal in Paris. A set of 112 folio registers that records nightly box office receipts from over 34,000 performances has been digitalized. That sales data has been made available online through three search and visualization tools, with access provided through an application program interface. The volume— comprised of three sets of essays, their respective comment, and a postface—is available as a PDF for download from (https://cfrp.mitpress.mit.edu). The editors and their contributors offer a dialogical approach to questions such as: How did politics, economics, and social conflict fashion the troupe’s repertory and affect its finances? Was the theater a place for critical colloquy of public issues, or a place to seek escape from the vicissitudes of life’s experiences?

Section 1, “Interpreting Data, Visualizations, and Sound,” explores the long-term tendencies in box office receipts and repertory choices throughout the eighteenth century and is rounded off by Dan Edelstein’s comment aptly titled “Back to the Future.” In his essay, “The Comédie-Française by the Numbers, 1752–2020,” Ravel compellingly invokes three earlier print studies—those of a “grub street writer” (Charles de Fieux, Chevalier de Mouhy, 1701–84), “an érudit” (Alexandre Joannidès, 1879–1926), and an “American literary historian” (Henry Carrington Lancaster, 1882–1954)—that [End Page 111] attempted to quantify the daily receipt registers of the Comédie-Française theater troupe. In the same way that the Comédie-Française Registers Project and other digital humanities projects reflect the exigencies of the second decade of the twenty-first century, so each of those earlier endeavors was informed by the ideological and sociocultural interests and expectations of the historical moment. Revisiting those earlier studies now not only underlines that “innovative quantitative scholarship existed before our current computational methods,” but also allows the “the benefits, possibilities, and limitations” of current digital modalities to be better understood and assessed (Guyot and Ravel 5).

What Ravel states concerning the successes and limitations of his predecessors is a touchstone for understanding the nature of current digital humanities projects: if the work of the three foregoing investigators “endures in the format of the codex book, and in the brick-and-mortar libraries that exist to conserve the rich bibliographical heritage of the past,” today’s digital technologies offer worldwide access (to the Comédie-Française registers) at all moments (29). Nevertheless, the lasting sustainability of these technologies and the commitment to create a means of conserving them “is shaky at best,” with the result that the availability of this data to future readers cannot be guaranteed (29). On the other hand, opines Ravel, data offered by the Comédie-Française Registers Project will not render humanities scholarship out of date, and while few humanists will replace “close reading and aesthetic judgement” with “online scrolling and clicking,” most will find interesting the insights that visual analysis of large quantities of data might bring to particular disciplines (30). This balanced assessment of the benefits and liabilities of digital humanities initiatives runs throughout the edited volume, making it in its totality a provocative meditation on more than just the ways that nightly box office data broaden perspectives in theater and performance studies; literary inquiry is complemented with material and economic...

审核人：

• 数据库、收入和剧目：法国在线舞台，1680-1793 / Données，recettes & répertoire。La scène en ligne (1680–1793)编辑。作者：Sylvaine Guyot 和 Jeffrey S. Ravel
• 苏珊·L·菲舍尔

仅限数字，开放获取，双语卷侧重于 Comédie-Française Registers Project 正在进行的工作，这是一项国际倡议，旨在调查数字人文方法如何“促进、丰富和影响对戏剧过去的研究”，如 Sylvaine Guyot 和 Jeffrey S. Ravel 在他们的介绍中指出 (3)。法兰西喜剧登记项目源于保存在巴黎皇宫另一侧的图书馆博物馆中极其完整的法兰西喜剧手稿和印刷记录。一套 112 个作品集登记册记录了超过 34,000 场演出的每晚票房收入，这些登记册已被数字化。该销售数据已通过三个搜索和可视化工具在线提供，并通过应用程序界面提供访问权限。该卷——由三组论文、各自的评论和一个邮报组成——可从 (https://cfrp.mitpress.mit.edu) 以 PDF 格式下载。编辑和他们的撰稿人提供了一种对话式的方法来解决以下问题：政治、经济和社会冲突是如何塑造剧团的剧目并影响其财务的？剧院是一个讨论公共问题的地方，还是一个寻求摆脱人生经历沧桑的地方？

第 1 节“解读数据、可视化和声音”探讨了 18 世纪票房收入和剧目选择的长期趋势，并以丹·埃德尔斯坦 (Dan Edelstein) 的题为“回到未来”的评论为结尾。在他的文章“The Comédie-Française by the Numbers, 1752–2020”中，拉威尔令人信服地引用了三个早期的印刷研究——那些“蛆虫街头作家”（Charles de Fieux, Chevalier de Mouhy, 1701-84），“一个érudit”（Alexandre Joannidès，1879–1926 年）和“美国文学史学家”（Henry Carrington Lancaster，1882–1954 年）—— [完第 111 页]试图量化法国喜剧剧团的每日收据记录。就像 Comédie-Française Registers Project 和其他数字人文项目反映了 21 世纪第二个十年的紧急情况一样，这些早期的努力中的每一项都受到历史时刻的意识形态和社会文化兴趣和期望的影响. 现在重新审视这些早期研究不仅强调了“创新的定量学术研究存在于我们当前的计算方法之前”，而且还可以更好地理解和评估当前数字模式的“好处、可能性和局限性”（Guyot 和 Ravel 5） .

拉威尔关于他的前辈的成功和局限性的陈述是理解当前数字人文项目性质的试金石：如果上述三位调查人员的工作“以抄本的形式存在，并且在实体为保存过去丰富的书目遗产而存在的图书馆”，今天的数字技术在全球范围内随时提供访问（访问 Comédie-Française 登记册）（29）。然而，这些技术的持久可持续性以及创造保护它们的方法的承诺“充其量是不稳定的”，因此无法保证这些数据对未来读者的可用性（29）。另一方面，拉威尔认为，Comédie-Française Registers Project 提供的数据不会使人文学术过时，虽然很少有人文主义者会用“在线滚动和点击”取代“仔细阅读和审美判断”，但大多数人会发现对大量数据进行可视化分析可能会给特定学科带来的见解很有趣（30）。这种对数字人文计划的收益和责任的平衡评估贯穿于整个编辑卷中，使其总体上成为对夜间票房数据拓宽戏剧和表演研究视角的方式的挑衅性思考；文学探究辅以物质和经济…… 这种对数字人文计划的收益和责任的平衡评估贯穿于整个编辑卷中，使其总体上成为对夜间票房数据拓宽戏剧和表演研究视角的方式的挑衅性思考；文学探究辅以物质和经济…… 这种对数字人文计划的收益和责任的平衡评估贯穿于整个编辑卷中，使其总体上成为对夜间票房数据拓宽戏剧和表演研究视角的方式的挑衅性思考；文学探究辅以物质和经济……