DraCor Corpora Conference

The DraCor Corpora Conference is part of the DraCor Summit 2025. It will take place on Tuesday, 2 September 2025.

As of now, the DraCor platform hosts 28 corpora in 22 languages, comprising more than 4,000 plays encoded in TEI/XML, ranging from Greek antiquity to the second half of the 20th century (sorted by number of plays):

  • FreDraCor, GerDraCor, EngDraCor, RusDraCor, CalDraCor, DutchDraCor, ItaDraCor, HunDraCor, SweDraCor, UDraCor, GreekDraCor, AmDraCor, GerShDraCor, ShakeDraCor, RomDraCor, PolDraCor, AlsDraCor, SpanDraCor, YiDraCor, TatDraCor, BashDraCor, inlcuding some in the making: ArDraCor, CzeDraCor, GeorgDraCor, HeDraCor, JesDraCor, NeoLatDraCor, RoDraCor

The DraCor Corpus Conference is intended as an opportunity for corpus maintainers to present their corpora in dedicated 10-minute presentations. This insight into various corpora is especially intended to discuss structural problems, facilitate corpus alignments, foster the exchange of workflows and present innovative approaches to corpus building. Anyone working on corpus projects is invited to apply, including colleagues whose corpora are not yet part of the DraCor environment.

When applying, please provide:

  • Name of corpus
  • Corpus coverage (temporally, spatially)
  • Info on corpus maintainers and participating institutions
  • URL and/or repository of the corpus, if available
  • Encoding format (if not already TEI/XML)
  • 300–500 words on the status of the respective corpus project and the expected benefits of a conference contribution

Information on where to submit your application will follow shortly.

The round of corpus presentations will be followed by cross-corpora discussions about general workflows, alignment and other strategies to build and maintain a corpus in the DraCor ecosystem.

Organisers of the DraCor Corpus Conference: Laura Untner, Frank Fischer (FU Berlin)

Workshop on Computational Drama Analysis: Achievements and Opportunities

The workshop is part of the DraCor Summit 2025. It will take place on Wednesday, 3 September 2025.

The analysis of drama through computational and quantitative methods has gone a long way from the first pioneering efforts of figures such as Boris Yarkho, Solomon Marcus, or Hartmut Ilsemann, and now represents a major research strand within Computational Literary Studies. The maturity of the field has also been demonstrated in the first edition of the Workshop on Computational Drama Analysis, held in Cologne in September 2022, whose contributions have been recently published (Andresen and Reiter 2024).

Three years later, we aim to convene to survey once again the current situation of computational drama analysis. What new achievements have been reached? Which obstacles are still to be overcome? To answer these questions, the workshop invites scholars working with and/or critically reflecting on formal, quantitative or digital methods for the analysis of drama to both discuss the current state of the field and imagine new perspectives for the future.

The workshop is organised as part of the DraCor Summit 2025 (1–5 September 2025). Thus, contributions using corpora, data, or tools developed within the DraCor project (Fischer et al. 2019) are particularly welcome, but this is not a requirement.

More broadly, we are interested in contributions addressing the following topics:

  • Application of computational methods for drama analysis, such as topic modelling, stylometry, network analyses, sentiment or emotion analyses
  • Critical reflection on their deployment within literary studies, in particular with respect to questions of generalisability, interpretability, and reproducibility of results
  • Development and application of language processing methods to character speech or stage directions
  • Exploring cultural evolution perspectives for drama history by means of corpus-based analyses or classifications
  • Theoretical perspectives on the application of digital methods in drama studies
  • Exploitation of linked open data and metadata analysis
  • LLM approaches to drama (history)

We invite the submission of short abstracts (up to 500 words) on any of the above mentioned or closely related topics by 6 May 2025. A decision on the acceptance to the workshop will be made by the workshop organisers. Submissions should be in English and do not need to be anonymised (non-blind).

Prior to the workshop, the accepted abstracts need to be extended into full papers (4000–6000 words), which will be collected in a conference reader provided to participants before the workshop. A template (word/odt/latex) will be provided to the authors of accepted abstracts.

Revised full papers will be later published as peer-reviewed conference proceedings; further details will follow. For the specific deadlines, please see the timeline below.

  • 6 May 2025: Deadline for Abstracts (up to 500 words)
  • until 26 May 2025: Notification of Acceptance
  • 10 August 2025: Deadline for Full Papers (4000–6000 words)
  • 3 September 2025: Workshop
  • end of 2025: Deadline for Revised Papers

Please send your abstract in PDF format to digital-humanities@uni-potsdam.de by 6 May 2025, quoting in the object “submission drama workshop”.

Organisers: Luca Giovannini, Daniil Skorinkin