Tabea Tietz, Ebrahim Norouzi, Prof. Dr. Harald Sack

Cultural heritage data have become increasingly important in recent years as archives have been digitizing and storing large amounts of objects, documents and memories in all varieties of formats and sizes. Now this data is waiting to be (re)discovered, researched and experienced by many scientific fields interdisciplinarily as well as by the general public. Part of this important cultural heritage is theatre. Historical theatre programs are invaluable artifacts that offer rich insights into the social, artistic, and political contexts of their time. Digitizing, structuring, and making them accessible to society ensures their preservation and enables wide-ranging research. Knowledge Graphs can be used to bring these historical theatre data back to life by making them findable, accessible, interoperable, and reus-able (FAIR) and by interconnecting them with existing external KGs such as Wikidata and the German Authority files. This thesis focuses on developing a pipeline for extracting structured information from digitized historical theatre programs of the Stuttgart State Theatres, with the goal of semantically enriching the data and integrating it into a Knowledge Graph. Using OCR and information extraction techniques, you will identify entities such as theatre venues, actors, roles, occupations, ticket prices, and performing arts works that help to uncover theatrical networks, trace artistic careers, and reveal shifting cultural trends.