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Now the first point to stress is, that this kind of research is not
actually possible, without the very medium you are using to follow this course.
Global Theater history is in fact,
a product of the digital age, and we need the Internet to do it.
So, I'd like to now, briefly introduce a few resources that we can use.
The most important one is I think, digital newspapers.
Now, of course, as you know, most newspapers today are online.
But there are also an increasing number of historical newspapers being made
available, and these are very interesting, and useful for us.
These are known as, digital online newspaper archives.
And most include, a so-called full-text search facility, which means that they,
use optical character recognition to search individual words.
Now this means that these programs can search literally, thousands and
thousands of pages of text within a few seconds, and give very, very detailed
records almost on a day to day basis of theatrical activity, as it happened.
Now, I'll demonstrate one, which I think is a very useful one.
Type in, "trove newspapers", and see what it finds.
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And, the digitalized newspapers contain, as you can see, 4,219 individual items.
Now these are not all just articles,
they are also advertisements different kinds of information.
Now, of course, this is a lot too much, for us.
We could, we could, of course, go on to Advanced search.
And we could restricts all the dates see, by publication date,
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we could just look at certain states in Australia, but just for
the time being, let's just look at one article, which looks interesting.
It says, "Sarah Bernhardt, Australasian Tour, contract by Marconigram."
Now, that sounds interesting.
"Sarah Bernhardt, contract by Marconigram."
It's the article tells us that, the famous Australian manager J.T.
Williamson, signed a contract with her while he was on-board ship,
and she was somewhere else, but it was all done by Marconigram, i. e. by telegram.
Now, this is of course, very interesting for us.
This is a very good resource that also gives you books about her.
So these could also be, it also gives you pictures, photos.
So let's have a look and
see what other information we can find about Sarah Bernhardt.
For instance, she was famous for her costumes, and her wardrobe.
So let's type in "wardrobe", and search for that.
Yes, here we have 600 and 607 articles about her wardrobe, so
let's look at, see what was in the Wagga Wagga Express in 1890.
Here we have it, "Sarah Bernhardt's wardrobe, Bernhardt has the most expensive wardrobe
of any actress of the present day, or of any, who trod the boards before her.
She invents all her own dresses.
No matter what the fashion may be, she has it, and when in London, has been known to
buy in one afternoon at Regent Street, a dozen to 20 new hats and bonnets."
And so it goes on telling us, how much money she spends on her wardrobe.
So, let's, that interests us as well, so we'll save that as well, with our,
as a PDF, and continue our search.
Another very useful resource are genealogical websites.
Now, these contain lots of information about people, birth dates, and so on.
But also their movements, they contain often shipping records, and
we can use them to track the movement of actors and
performers, as they moved around the world.
Now, the largest of these is called ancestery.com.
Let's type in the name, of an actor-manager, I'm interested in.
He is called "Maurice Bandmann", and he was born around 1872,
but you don't need to actually, include that date, and let's just see.
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What else?
Oh, also, New York, Passenger Lists, 1820 to 1957, so we can actually,
track him as he moves around on ships, which he did all the time.
Here, we have the UK, Outward Passenger Lists.
So, when he's leaving the UK to go somewhere,
we'll also find information on him, also burials, and so on.
So, as you can see this is, the this resource,
contains a lot of information of a very personal kind.
That's just one example.
You will find a detailed list of other historical newspapers in the material section.
And so, you can have some fun by doing some research yourself.
Christopher BalmeProfessor
