Knutson, Roslyn L., David McInnis, and Matthew Steggle, eds. The Lost Plays Database
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Lost Plays Database is an open source Wiki that catalogues what we know about lost plays from the early modern theatre.It is fast becoming an invaluable resource to the student or scholar interested in the period's drama.The editors-Roslyn L. Knutson, David McInnis, and Matthew Steggle-not content to join the ranks of those who decry how little remains from the period's theatre, have curated a database that shows just how much can be learned from the study of that which is lost.Rather than adhere to a lost/not-lost binary, the database offers degrees of "lostness": it is "a continuum, not an absolute state." 1 Such a fact is made clear by the entries in the database.Readers can peruse entries with several thousand words, like the one for the Late Murder in White Chapel, or Keep the Widow Waking, or be met with a red link, signalling a blank page for an entry, meaning information about plays like the anonymous Pontius Pilate appears agonizingly out of reach.This is no criticism: before the editors undertook their work, all lost plays were effectively empty database entries.And the last major word on lost early modern plays had been C. J. Sisson's Lost Plays of Shakespeare's Age in 1936.The database has recently migrated from lostplays.org to being hosted on the Folger Shakespeare Library's site.Those familiar with its old home will note a quiet move away from the Wikipedia-style appearance for the site.The "deep red hues of wax seals" chosen to signal the site as a "scholarly research tool" remain though, as does the search-bar and side-bar.2 Entries themselves follow a uniform style with a "Contents" box at the top of each page, hyperlinked to find each section in an entry.Records contain sections like "Historical Records, " "Theatrical Provenance, " "Probable Genre(s), " "Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues, " "References to the Play, " "Critical Commentary, " and "For What It's Worth." Each is a gold mine, often replete with pictures, links, 1.David McInnis and Matthew Steggle, "Introduction: Nothing Will Come of Nothing?Or, What Can We Learn from Plays That Don't Exist?, " in Lost Plays in Shakespeare's England, ed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.045 | 0.042 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".