Comparing Theater in Alsatian with the Dramatic Traditions at its Source

Presentation

The Thealtres project involves a comparison of concrete aspects of Alsatian theater (1800 to 1929) and the traditions that have influenced it most: German popular theater, thanks to genres like the Scwhank and Posse, and French popular theater, via different types of vaudeville. We focus on features like the plays’ dramatis personæ and character social varaiables, which give an indication of the social universe depicted in the plays and possible conflicts in them. We also look at character relations and the plays’ setting and basic structure. Tunes and tune reuse is another topic of interest.

Obtaining these types of annotations scales well to up to several hundred plays, so that quantitative analyses become possible in order to compare the plays’ diachronic evolution per language and sub-genre. Such an approach has not yet been applied in order to compare Alsatian theater and the major traditions surrounding it, and it contributes to a more precise and inclusive literary history.

In an earlier project, MeThAL, Towards a Macroanalysis of Theater in Alsatian, we developed the first large, public, TEI-encoded corpus for Alsatian theater. We also performed character social variable annotations. This methodology is now extended to compare Alsatian, German and French popular theater.

The project is part of the scientific program at MISHA (Alsace Interuniversity Hub for the Human Sciences) in 2023-2024.

Team

The project involves a collaboration between researchers at University of Strasbourg’s LiLPa Lab (Linguistique, Langues et Parole), the project’s main site, University of Cologne’s Institut für Digital Humanities and University of Basel’s Seminar for French Linguistics and Literary Studies.

Project coordinators at each site are Pablo Ruiz Fabo in Strasbourg, Benjamin Krautter in Cologne and Lara Nugues in Basel.

Our collaborators are experts in the project’s areas: Delphine Bernhard, Pascale Erhart, Christophe Gérard, Dominique Huck and Carole Werner in Strasbourg, Nils Reiter in Cologne and Anne-Sophie Bories in Basel. We’ll also collaborate with the DataLab at Strasbourg’s National Library (Bnu).

We also have two interns in 2023: Fanny Boisnard for German corpus development and Alexia Schneider for French corpus development.

Outputs

The project started in January 2023. The project’s initial stages consist in corpus collection and data development for the three traditions: Alsatian, German and French.

We will also have events like a quantitative drama analysis tutorial and a workshop on DH approaches to drama analysis, besides a Wikidatathon organized with the Bnu DataLab.

Like in our earlier Alsatian theater project, MeThAL, our data will be published following FAIR standards.

Repositories

Publications

  • Ruiz Fabo, Pablo, Boisnard, Fanny, Schneider, Alexia, Nugues, Lara, Krautter, Benjamin (2023). Comparaison entre le théâtre en alsacien (1800-1929) et ses traditions dramatiques sources. Humanistica 2023. Poster: https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10134342. Abstract: https://hal.science/hal-04105543
  • Ruiz Fabo, Pablo, Boisnard, Fanny, Schneider, Alexia (accepted). Comparative metadata for popular theater in Alsatian, German and French. Accepted at Digital Humanities 2024.

Events

About this site

The site is managed by Pablo Ruiz Fabo.

Wowchemy was used to create the site.

The site is hosted at Université de Strasbourg, using GitLab Pages.