Artificial intelligence and more than 7800 volunteers helped to digitize the history of the Bolshoi Theatre

2020: Digitization of history of the Bolshoi Theatre

The Bolshoi Theatre and ABBYY company (with participation KAMIS) completed the large-scale volunteer project "Open History Big" (openbolshoi.ru). The artificial intelligence of ABBYY and more than 7800 volunteers helped to digitize, take and systematize information from 48,000 posters, 120,000 applets and 100,000 photos of a collection of the museum of the Bolshoi Theatre. ABBYY reported about it on June 10, 2020. The valuable data is already loaded into the electronic base of the museum of the Bolshoi Theatre developed by KAMIS company. The staff of the museum should analyze all data array and to publish on the website of electronic archive of theater that information became available to everyone.

Project objective "Open history Big" was to digitize and arrange information from a collection of paper applets and photos for the electronic database of theater. At first all historical documents were scanned and recognized by the ABBYY FineReader program. Then intellectual technologies of ABBYY took data from documents: names of performances, names of actors, conductors and so forth.

The project is obliged by the success to volunteers. "Open history Big" integrated not indifferent people from more than 60 countries of the world: USA, Australia, Brazil, India, China, many countries of Europe and, of course, Russia. They carefully checked and supplemented information at each stage of the project to exclude possible errors and as much as possible to bring closer electronic document revisions to the original. Also volunteers were completely given the third stage of the project – a rubrication of historical photos. Participants entered the handwritten texts written on turnovers of images to electronic base. Thanks to efforts of volunteers, people from around the world will be able to see the most high points of performances of Maya Plisetskaya, Galina Ulanova, Fedor Shalyapin and even more than 5 thousand actors of theater.

In a final part of the project specialists of ABBYY systematized data according to requirements of staff of the museum. They customized automatic translation of texts with pre-revolutionary spelling into modern Russian, filled the passed fields, corrected typos, led digits and texts to a uniform format. All information from archives of theater on 54 thousand performances and 75 thousand persons was loaded into the database developed by KAMIS company. In process of check by specialists of the museum of the Bolshoi Theatre, data are published on specially developed search section of the theatrical website.

Huge work which would hardly manage to be performed in so short time without modern technology developments of ABBYY company and without human factor – without love to the Bolshoi Theatre of thousands of volunteers from the most different countries is done, – Vladimir Urin, the CEO of the Bolshoi Theatre notes. – These summer days when the world as though measurement, and the Bolshoi Theatre it is forced does not show performances several months, it is especially pleasant to me to thank our partners – ABBYY company and our correct audience who spent three years for performing the project on digitization of archives of the Bolshoi Theatre. Thousands of photos, posters, daily programs of our performances in the nearest future will become available not only to specialists, historians of theater who come to work to the museum.

ABBYY creates artificial intelligence technologies which help to turn separate data into useful information. We especially appreciate projects in which the company not only solves routine tasks of people, but also helps to broaden horizons, to save culture and the history of the country, to get inspiration and the ideas for work and life. Projects, similar "Open history Big", in the world it is still a little. But I am sure that we will be able to solve harder and harder and major problems in the different countries of the world with development of technologies of natural languag processing, – Dmitry Shushkin, the CEO of ABBYY Russia comments.

The command of ABBYY and volunteers did huge and very important work. Several thousands of programs of performances of the Bolshoi Theatre since 1901 were scanned, and then processed in such a way that for June, 2020 we can find among thousands of images the necessary applet of any performance and concert passing on our stage, to look when and with what partners this or that actor, what conductors, directors performed, artists participated in setting of performances. Except applets were processed and several thousands of posters of the performances scanned earlier and a period of time was even more here: since 1858, – Lidiya Kharina, the director of the museum of the Bolshoi Theatre says. – It is huge and very interesting archive which is available in electronic form now. All staff of the Museum and Bolshoi Theatre and also the researchers coming to work to us actively use it. We hope that soon it will be available also to wide audience, the staff of the Museum checks all array of the entered information, systematizes it definitely, adds illustrative material.

During the Open History Big project volunteers helped to collect interesting statistics about the history of the main theater of the country. So, in the 19th century about 450 times staged the opera "Life for the tsar". In the XX century of nearly 60 years of one of the most popular settings of theater there was an opera Eugene Onegin. Inimitable Maya Plisetskaya played Odetta and Odile's roles in the ballet "Swan lake" of 175 times, and the famous lyrical tenor Leonid Sobinov sang the aria by Lensky not less than 86 times. There were also other finds connected with life of theater and its audience. For example, participants detected on pages of applets unusual settings, such as opera written by the empress Catherine II, the vaudeville translated by the poet Nikolay Nekrasov, experimental ballets of the 30th years of the 20th century. Published not only information on actors, but also advertizing and even declarations of the forgotten things in applets.

2016

Tasks: Make available to everyone historical heritage of the Bolshoi Theatre.

Result: Creation of unique electronic archive with information from 48,000 posters, 120,000 applets and more than 100,000 photos.

Project terms: March-September, 2016