Team: Jason Lipshin, Jia Zhang, Ayse Gursoy, Jamie Folsom

Short Description: The Comedie Francaise Registers Project is a suite of data visualization tools for analyzing large corpuses of archival data. The archive, which includes 400 years of ticket sales data for the Comedie Francaise, France’s national theater troupe, is a vital resource for theater scholars, literary historians, and those interested in the political, social, and cultural history of France more generally. HyperStudio’s custom visualization tools allow scholars to explore and discern patterns in the data at scales which were previously unimaginable.

My Role: Many conference presentations on the project; sketching potential interfaces in collaboration with interface designer; rough prototypes created with Javascript D3 library.

Advisors: Kurt Fendt (Executive Director, MIT HyperStudio); Jeffrey Ravel (Associate Professor, MIT Department of History). This project is an ongoing initiative of HyperStudio, MIT’s digital humanities research lab.

*Note: You can check out a prototype of our parallel axis graph (which is shown above) at this link. Although I did not participate in the development of this particular graph, I am currently working with the team to develop other visualizations using the D3-Javascript library.