DraCor: Drama Corpora

The Drama Corpora (DraCor) comprises a set of 21 corpora consisting of theater plays in 14 languages and dialects. This collection serves as a valuable resource for scholars and researchers involved in the fields of digital humanities, literature studies, and linguistics. The corpus texts have been prepared within DraCor, an open platform for research on (European) drama. For more information visit the official website: https://dracor.org/

The Drama corpora contain various metadata such as title, author, or the year of publication.

Overview of Drama corpora

Here is an overview of the Drama corpora available via Sketch Engine:

  • Alsatian Drama Corpus (7 plays) – maintained by Pablo Ruiz Fabo at University of Strasbourg
  • Bashkir Drama Corpus (3 plays)
  • Calderón Drama Corpus (149 plays) – maintained by University of Tübingen, Institute of Romance Languages and Literatures
  • Czech Drama Corpus (10 plays)
  • English Drama Corpus (782 plays)
  • French Drama Corpus (1,451 plays)
  • German Drama Corpus (628 plays, 18th–20th century)
  • Greek Drama Corpus (39 plays) – via Perseus
  • Hebrew Drama Corpus (71 plays)
  • Hungarian Drama Corpus (40 plays)
  • Italian Drama Corpus (136 plays, 15th–19th century) – via Biblioteca italiana
  • Polish Drama Corpus (10 plays)
  • Roman Drama Corpus (36 plays)
  • Russian Drama Corpus (212 plays, 18th-20th century)
  • Shakespeare English Drama Corpus (37 plays) – via Folger
  • Shakespeare German Drama Corpus (38 plays) – via Folger
  • Spanish Drama Corpus (25 plays) – via BETTE
  • Swedish Drama Corpus (64 plays) – via Dramawebben
  • Tatar Drama Corpus (3 plays)
  • Ukrainian Drama Corpus (39 plays)
  • Yiddish Drama Corpus (5 plays)

Search the Drama corpora

Sketch Engine offers a range of tools to work with these Drama corpora.

Tools to work with the Drama corpora

A complete set of Sketch Engine tools is available to work with these Drama corpora to generate:

  • word sketch – collocations categorized by grammatical relations
  • thesaurus – synonyms and similar words for every word
  • keywords – terminology extraction of one-word and multi-word units
  • word lists – lists of nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. organized by frequency
  • n-grams – frequency list of multi-word units
  • concordance – examples in context
  • text type analysis – statistics of metadata in the corpus

Note: Some of the corpora do not support all of the mentioned functions.

Drama Corpora (2023)

  • 2023-12 – 21 corpora published

Fischer, Frank, et al. (2019). Programmable Corpora: Introducing DraCor, an Infrastructure for the Research on European Drama. In Proceedings of DH2019: “Complexities”, Utrecht University, doi:10.5281/zenodo.4284002.

Other corpora

Explore our other corpora

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