The benefits of increasing the digital availability of Alsatian theater
Résumé
We present a digital corpus of plays in Alsatian language varieties with rich metadata. We transcribed bibliographical metadata for 359 plays, and annotated social attributes like professional group, social class and gender for 2,253 characters. Regarding full-text availability, TEI encoding is ongoing and already carried out for 25 plays (300,000 tokens). At the moment, corrected OCR output is available for 28 further plays, which await TEI encoding. This material helps computational literary research on Alsatian theater, impossible before given lack of a corpus, and has shown potential to challenge existing knowledge on the tradition. The texts also have relevance for NLP research on low-resource languages. To promote interest in language diversity and in the corpus' language varieties, we also created a corpus exploration interface, which allows navigating the corpus based on plays’ metadata and on character attributes. This interface can be useful for research and, particularly, opens up the resources to a wider non-specialist community.
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