The Restoration Comedy Project: Goals and Challenges

This article describes the main goals of the Restoration Comedy Project and its progress from its inception in 1997 to its current condition. By foregrounding the challenges the project team has faced in the definition of the corpus and in the extraction, classification, and analysis of data concerning the comedies of the Restoration period, I seek to explain what has been achieved and what is yet to be achieved. I also compare our response to these challenges with those undertaken by scholars engaged in similar projects, to show that these situations are common even if often silenced in descriptions of database research. Finally, this article serves as a general, contextual introduction to the rest of the articles in this same volume of RECTR, which focus on more particular aspects of the project.