The Atlantic Canada Theatre Site is an academically-refereed Internet site which publishes a wide range of primary research materials of interest to Canadian theatre scholars, and to social, cultural, and political historians of the Atlantic region. Its Editorial Board is made up of researchers who have long been active in various areas of Canadian drama. Its Board of Management is composed of professional librarians with much experience in the preparation, presentation, and archiving of electronic materials.
Much theatrical research, created over many decades, remains intimidating to modern scholars simply because it involves mounds of data locked into a print form incapable of being restructured or researched, without great expenditures of time and effort. The primary focus of ACTS is to make such research available in a form which takes advantage of the searchability of electronic materials and thus allows for a re-viewing and restructuring of 'old' data in new ways.
Scholars who feel that their own research projects would benefit from being made available worldwide in electronic form should contact the ACTS Editorial Board.
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The Atlantic Canada Theatre Site Editorial Board:
Edward Mullaly is the founding editor of the Atlantic Canada Theatre Site. A recently retired professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, his publications in Canadian theatre history have included many articles, as well as Desperate Stages (Fredericton 1987) a study of theatre activity along the Atlantic coast in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s which focuses on a minor actor/manager named Henry W. Preston. He has been a maritime representative to the Association for Canadian Theatre Research, and on the Management Board of Theatre Research in Canada.
John Ball retired as Chief Librarian of Scarborough College, University of Toronto in 1994. He has worked extensively in the past three decades in the area of Canadian theatre bibliography. He is co-editor, with Richard Plant, of The Bibliography of Theatre History in Canada (ECW Press, 1993). He has co-ordinated the production of the updates to the ACTS bibliography, which are also published annually in the ACTR Newsletter and included on this site.
Bruce Barton is an educator, playwright, dramaturg, and director. He holds a doctorate in Drama and Theatre from the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto, where he now holds a position in playwriting and dramaturgy. He has articles published and forthcoming in Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada, Essays in Drama, Theatre Journal, and Canada on Stage. Book projects include a theoretical study of the relationship between theatre and film (to be published in 2003), an anthology of Maritimes playwriting (2004) and a critical history of Atlantic Canadian theatre (2005). He is currently completing an extensive entry on Canadian Drama in English for the on-line Canadian Encyclopedia, and he is the author of the annual, year-end drama review essay for the University of Toronto Quarterly. He is also the editor of Theatre Research in Canada. Bruce is a national award-winning playwright with credits in stage and video production, as well as CBC radio drama. He is the past-President of the Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre, and a current member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.
Richard Plant is Professor Emeritus, Queen's University, and Professor at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto. He has published extensively in Canadian theatre and been involved in the discipline in various capacities for many years. He is co-editor, with John Ball, of the Bibliography of Theatre History in Canada (ECW Press 1993).
Mary Elizabeth Smith is a Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at St. Stephen's University. She has published articles on various aspects of Atlantic Canadian theatre in The Dalhousie Review, Theatre History in Canada, Canadian Drama, Theatre Survey, and Theatre Research International. She has contributed chapters on theatre in New Brunswick to A Literary and Linguistic History of New Brunswick and to Contemporary Canadian Theatre: New World Visions. Her book, Too Soon the Curtain Fell (Fredericton 1981) , is a narrative study of drama and of theatre in Saint John from 1789 to 1900. She has been active on the executive of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research.
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The Atlantic Canada Theatre Site's Board of
Management:
Alan Burk is Director of the Electronic Text Centre and Associate Director of the Libraries. He is active in the areas of electronic publishing and digital libraries. Alan has a PhD in philosophy from Brown University. He is an Honourary Research Associate through the Department of English and an Associate Director and Researcher for the CFI funded 6.78 million dollar Pan-Canadian TAPoR humanities computing initiative. He is a member of the steering committee for Synergies, a large, multi-institutional application to CFI to establish a nation-wide research infrastructure to support scholarly communication. Alan is a frequent speaker at conferences and is an active program organizer in humanities computing and digital libraries. He founded the Centre’s successful Summer Institute program.
Lisa Charlong is Assistant Director and Coordinator of XML and SGML Initiatives at The Electronic Text Centre at UNB Libraries. Lisa has been involved with numerous scholarly communications and publishing projects including: The Atlantic Canada Portal and The Chadwyck- Healey-published Canadian Poetry online collection. Lisa's background is in information technology, education, archives, and art. Her current research interests revolve around the creation and use of structured data and digital collections as educational resources.
James Kerr is Journal Production Coordinator at the Electronic Text Centre at UNB Libraries. The ETC is currently publishing 10 journals online, as well as various conference and technical publications. James is involved in all stages of the development of the various sites, including format and design. His background is in history, education and religious studies.
Jason Nugent is the Senior Programmer and Database Developer at the Electronic Text Centre at UNB Libraries. He has been heavily involved with web and database development for over a decade, and is a regular contributor to Open Source software projects on SourceForge. Before working with the ETC, he taught web development, UNIX administration, and relational database theory at Dalhousie University, and also worked in the private sector, developing innovative web solutions for a number of organizations. He holds an honours degree in Chemistry.
Stephen Sloan is Systems Librarian at UNB
Libraries. He has held this post for twelve years, before that working in
UNB's Engineering Library and in Fort McMurray, Alberta, with Syncrude Canada
and the city's Public Library. For four years he served as the WebMaster for
both the library and the University as a whole. He has worked extensively
with a variety of Web-based practices including CGI scripting and building
databases using the LiveLink software from OpenText.
In 1993, Stephen was awarded a Futures Fund grant of $8,500 to
begin investigation into the "Virtual Library" concept. In 1995,
an article co-authored with David Cunningham won the "Computers in Libraries"
Article of the Year Award. In 1997, an article he wrote was named by ALA
as one of the top twenty Bibliographic Instruction publications of the year.
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From its founding in 1996, the Electronic Text Centre (ETC) made the University of New Brunswick a Canadian leader in the creation and Web distribution of electronic texts. Today, the ETC Web publishes to standards and best practices a variety of journals and special collection texts and images. It also provides the infrastructure necessary to support scholars who are working with advanced technologies to further their research and to facilitate scholarly communication. A growing thrust of the ETC is its collaboration with researchers from institutions across Canada and the United States in investigating issues of humanities computing, digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing.
In the area of humanities computing, the ETC is working with and investigating a range of technologies that markedly contribute to a scholar's ability to carry out research – for example, representing texts in XML to support sophisticated textual analysis. Recently, the ETC used this technology to develop the Canadian Poetry Database in collaboration with the international, scholarly electronic publisher, Chadwyck-Healey. The Canadian Poetry Database is an XML full-text database that includes the works of 183 poets, covering the 18th to the early 20th century. A version of the database is being published through Chadwyck-Healey's Literature Online (http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/), a highly searchable library of 330,000 scholarly works of poetry, drama, and prose.
The ETC is also active in the area of digital library research, investigating protocols and architectures to promote the effective dissemination of different forms of electronic scholarly communication. For example, the ETC has received grants and contracts from SSHRC, Industry Canada, and CANARIE to research data structures that describe electronic texts, images, and other media for the purposes of data management and resource discovery. Under contract to Industry Canada's SchoolNet and working with international researchers, the ETC investigated data structures to describe still images, video, and audio. This research was designed to ensure that school-age children could effectively search a growing SchoolNet Web site for multimedia objects and, at a more granular level, objects within objects, such as scenes within videos.
Because it operates on the edge of Web-based scholarly activities,
the ETC is undertaking advanced research into some of the technical issues
surrounding electronic publishing. Currently, the University through the Electronic
Text Centre is a collaborating institution in a 29 million dollar application
to CFI for SYNERGIES: Canadian Scholarly Publications and Communication Network.
SYNERGIES is looking to revolutionize social sciences and humanities scholarly
discourse in Canada by creating a sophisticated research infrastructure for
the distribution of Canadian research results.
The Electronic Text Centre brings to the Atlantic Canada Theatre
Site a complete publishing and archiving process. Because the Atlantic Canada
Theatre Site is not a physical artifact, a guarantee of its continued availability
on the Internet is essential. Such availability has been assured through the
Centre’s support.
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Copyright Notice:
All texts presented here are in the public domain, are copyrighted by the University of New Brunswick, or have had permissions granted to make them accessible electronically. The Text Centre has made every attempt to clear copyright where clearance is not expressly stated and we ask that people contact us immediately with any concerns or noted omissions.
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