Czech Database of Ancient Drama

The project the Czech Database of Ancient Drama is a project the aim of which is to compile and classify all relevant information concerning the role of ancient drama in Czech culture in the last two centuries. It systematically collects and evaluates unique data on theatrical productions, translations, and adaptations of ancient Greek and Roman authors in Czech lands. This project is based on the Database of Greek and Roman Drama on the Czech Stage created by Prof. Eva Stehlikova. This database comprises data about 440 performances and almost 4500 names of artists, references, photos, audio-visual materials, and bibliographical data since 1889 that are not to be found anywhere else. The new project will complete and further elaborate the database compiled by Prof. Stehlíková, and, most important of all, it will combine it with an entirely new database of the Czech translations of Ancient Literature beginning with the most-dated and now almost inaccessible publications. The state-of-the-art methods and data processing are used in order to make the data directly accessible in digital form on the web. All the data of the database is available on the academic website: www.olympos.cz. The visual and textual digital database is already an internationally acknowledged project and as such it is coordinated with the two most important international endeavors in this field, namely the European Network of Research and Documentation of Ancient Greek Drama and the Foundation of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in Oxford.

The database comprises:

 

a) Data on almost 440 performances of Greek and Roman drama in Czech professional, semi-professional, amateurish, school and marionette theatres.

b) Subsidiary database files of more than 4500 biographical and bibliographical data, the majority of which consists of completely digitized reviews, photographs, scripts, different Czech translations and various scenographic materials.

 

The database of ancient drama on the Czech stage is the first of its kind. Nowhere in the world do similar databases include—apart from the basic data on performances and translations—such a huge amount of visual and textual documentation, photographic and scenographic materials, translations, scenarios, and fulltext reviews. The database of Czech translations of ancient literature is a source of unclassified translation material beginning with the oldest Czech translations — now almost inaccessible publications a archive of audio and video recordings.