Firsts & Founders: Early Women in Drama at Yale

Epilogue: Naming Early Women in Drama at Yale

While this exhibition has naturally focused on women who are well represented in archival records and Yale Library’s print collections, many others are known to us only as names, or brief mentions in directory listings or newspaper articles. Using data from the Ensemble@Yale project (and making educated guesses about gendered names in the 1920s–40s), we are working to reveal more of the early women in drama at Yale.

This data visualization (below) aims to illuminate women in the early years of the Department of Drama, and the onstage and offstage roles they played—the initial steps on the path that so many other firsts and founders have continued in the years since. The names are organized alphabetically from left to right, and those that are brighter and closer to the center line appear more frequently in our print records.

The data visualization is a large image! Use the viewer below to explore by zooming in and moving through different areas. It may be easier (and more immersive) to view in full screen mode.

Ensemble@Yale

Ensemble@Yale is Haas Arts Library’s crowdsourced transcription project to record the thousands of names printed inside archived performance programs from Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre, bringing them into a searchable database and enabling further analysis. In collaboration with Yale Library’s Digital Humanities Laboratory, and using the Zooniverse Project Builder, more than 1,000 programs (digitized from Arts Library Special Collections with financial support from Yale Repertory Theatre and the Yale School of Drama) have been transcribed by hundreds of volunteers. Work on the resulting data is under way, and this visualization represents a first glimpse into the exciting possibilities of that data.

For more information on the project, visit ensemble.yale.edu.