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 variables, 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.

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).

Several interns have had major contributions to the project:

• In 2023, Fanny Boisnard and Alexia Schneider started off German corpus development and French corpus development respectively, covering about 50% of the target corpus volume.

• In 2024, Fanny Boisnard completed the corpus for all three traditions (Alsatian, German, French), reaching 10,000 annotated characters from over 950 plays. Enzo Doyen developed a visualization interface.

The project is funded between January 2023 and December 2024. The project’s initial stages consisted in corpus collection and data development for the three traditions: Alsatian, German and French.

Several events are planned, like 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

• Group https://git.unistra.fr/thealtres, also mirrored at https://github.com/thealtres

Publications and presentations

• Schneider, Alexia, Ruiz Fabo, Pablo. (2024). Stage Direction Classification in French Theater: Transfer Learning Experiments. In Proceedings of LaTeCH-CLfL 2024, the 8th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pp. 278–286, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2024.latechclfl-1.28/
• Ruiz Fabo, Pablo, Boisnard, Fanny, Schneider, Alexia (2024). Comparative metadata for popular theater in Alsatian, German and French. Digital Humanities 2024. Poster: https://hal.science/hal-04520875. Abstract: https://zenodo.org/records/11306739
• Doyen, Enzo, Ruiz Fabo, Pablo. (2024). Navigation structurée de métadonnées de théâtre. Humanités numériques en pédagogie et en recherche 2. Université de Strasbourg
• Ruiz Fabo, Pablo, Boisnard, Fanny, Schneider, Alexia. (2024). Paysage social représenté dans le théâtre populaire en alsacien, allemand et français. Humanités numériques en pédagogie et en recherche 2. Université de Strasbourg
• 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

Datasets

• Boisnard, F., Schneider, A., Pablo Ruiz Fabo, Nugues, L., Krautter, B. (2024). Thealtres project annotations: Comparing theater in Alsatian with the dramatic traditions at its source. (v1.0) [Data set]. Université de Strasbourg - Laboratoire LiLPa. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10520031

Applications

• Doyen, Enzo, Pablo Ruiz Fabo. (2024). Thealtres visualization application (v1.0.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11289443

Events

• Workshop Data and theater big and small: The smart, the clean and the messy / Données de théâtre, petit et grand jeu : Le bon, le brut et le futé. November 29, 2023 at 2pm, salle 0.20 du Collège doctoral européen

The site is managed by Pablo Ruiz Fabo. The main developer for the visualization interface was Enzo Doyen. For data development credits, see doi:10.5281/zenodo.10520031.

Wowchemy (aka Hugo Blox) was used to create the site.

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