Since I first encountered The Parisian Stage, I’ve been impressed by the completeness of Beaumont Wicks’s life’s work: from 1950 through 1979 he compiled a list of every play performed in the theaters of Paris between 1800 and 1899. I’ve used it as the basis for my Digital Parisian Stage corpus, currently a one percent sample of the first volume (Wicks 1950), available in full text on GitHub.
Last week I had an idea for another project. Science requires both qualitative and quantitative research, and I’ve admired Neil Freeman’s @everylotnyc Twitter bot as a project that conveys the diversity of the underlying data and invites deep, qualitative exploration.
In 2016, with Timm Dapper, Elber Carneiro and Laura Silver I forked Freeman’s everylotbot code to create @everytreenyc, a random walk through the New York City Parks Department’s 2015 street tree census. Every three hours during normal New York active time, the bot tweets information about a tree from the database, in a template written by Laura that may also include topical, whimsical sayings.
Recently I’ve encountered a lot of anniversaries. A lot of it is connected to the centenary of the First World War I, but some is more random: I just listened to an episode of la Fabrique de l’histoire about François Mitterrand’s letters to his mistress that was promoted with the fact that he was born in 1916, one hundred years before that episode aired, even though he did not start writing those letters until 1962.
There are lots of “On this day” blogs and Twitter feeds, such as the History Channel and the New York Times, and even specialized feeds like @ThisDayInMETAL. There are #OnThisDay and #otd hashtags, and in French #CeJourLà. The “On this day” feeds have two things in common: they tend to be hand-curated, and they jump around from year to year. For April 13, 2014, the @CeJourLa feed tweeted events from 1849, 1997, 1695 and 1941, in that order.
Two weeks ago I was at the Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association, describing my Digital Parisian Stage corpus, and I realized that in the Parisian Stage there were plays being produced exactly two hundred years ago. I thought of the #OnThisDay feeds and @everytreenyc, and realized that I could create a Twitter bot to pull information about plays from the database and tweet them out. A week later, @spectacles_xix sent out its first automated tweet, about the play la Réconciliation par ruse.
la Réconciliation par ruse, par Riboutté, comédie en 1 acte, a débuté jeudi le 15 janvier 1818 au Théâtre Français. Wicks 5583.
— Spectacles il y a 200 ans (@spectacles_xix) January 15, 2018
@spectacles_xix runs on Pythonanywhere in Python 3.6, and accesses a MySQL database. It uses Mike Verdone’s Twitter API client. The source is open on GitHub.
Unlike other feeds, including this one from the French Ministry of Culture that just tweeted about the anniversary of the première of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, this one will not be curated, and it will not jump around from year to year. It will tweet every play that premièred in 1818, in order, until the end of the year, and then go on to 1819. If there is a day when no plays premièred, like January 16, @spectacles_xix will not tweet.
I have a couple of ideas about more features to add, so stay tuned!