Theory

Research question

A possible explanation

          1400                        1500                          1600                            1700                           1800

This is how Moretti envisions the development of European tragedy

Concurring explanations

• Emphasising unity over diversity:
  • Küpper (2018): early modern drama as a cultural
    net in which textual elements such as plots, characters, and motifs circulate and are periodically extracted, reworked and reused in individual
    plays
  • Clubb (1990): diffusion of theathergrams

 How to empirically investigate the evolution of early modern drama?

Corpus

Corpus features

• 150 plays in five languages (🇮🇹 🇫🇷 🇪🇸 🇩🇪 🇬🇧)

• time span: 1561-1710 (150 years)

• purposefully non-canonical approach

• balance between representativeness and practicability

Birth locations for the corpus authors (via Wikidata, partial data)

Text onboarding pipeline

Early Modern Drama Corpus (EmDraCor)

running on a local version of the DraCor platform via Docker

Homepage

Methods

Operationalising drama

Collecting drama metrics

via the DraCor API or re-computed independently

(following Algee-Hewitt 2017, Szemes and Vida 2024, Trilcke et al. 2017)

• collect metrics in feature vectors or play embeddings
  • containing a variety of measures embodying different textual aspects of the dramatic text

Experiments

Basic hypothesis

• distances between vectors can be assumed to express the degree of (dis)similarity between them
  • two plays whose embeddings are quite far one from the other will also be different in terms of form
• the branching of dramatic traditions can be seen through the ’progressive distancing’ of the plays’ vectors

1. Distances

Two options for measuring distance between vectors

pairwise

(cf. Wittgenstein's family resemblances)   

centroid-based

(cf. ideal type theory)

Pairwise implementation

Centroid-based implementation

2. Clusters

1. Representing play vectors as points on a Cartesian plane via dimensionality reduction methods (here: PCA)

2. Visually identifying clusters based on formal/structural similarities

3. Patterns

Approach

• Focus on each individual metric and follow its evolution across the different sub-corpora by computing shifts in absolute value across the time span
• Verify whether the variation of a given feature has become highly distinctive of a national tradition against the others
  • Caveat: not all metric variations are significant!

First steps towards a quantitative profiling of dramatic traditions

Types of measure: network - size - cast & speech - plot

A reproduction experiment

• Data: EngDraCor + FreDraCor, 1561-1710
• Method: vectorisation and distance experiments  
• Goal: compare results to those obtained in the corresponding EmDraCor subsets
• Results:
  • patterns recognised in the smaller EmDraCor sub-corpora are amplified versions of those found in the broader ones
  • results from EmDraCor are not fully replicated, but they can still highlight trends in the formal development of European theatre

A vindication of vectorisation

Conclusions

Limitations

Bibliography

• Algee-Hewitt, M. (2017). "Distributed character: Quantitative models of the English stage, 1550–1900". New Literary History, 48(4), 751-782.

• Allison, S.; Heuser, R.; Jockers, M.; Moretti, F.; Witmore, M. (2011). "Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment". Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlet 1.

• Clubb, L. G. (1990). Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time. New Haven: Yale UP.

• Fischer, F., Börner, I.; Göbel, M.; Hechtl, A.; Kittel, C.; Milling, C., Trilcke, P. (2019). "Programmable Corpora: Introducing DraCor, an Infrastructure for the Research on European Drama". In: DH2019 Book of Abstracts. University of Utrecht, 2019.

• Jannidis, F. (2022). "Digitale Literaturwissenschaft. Zur Einführung". In: Jannidis, F. (ed.), Digitale Literaturwissenschaft. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, pp. 1-16.

• Herrmann, J. B.; Bories, A.-S.; Frontini, F.; Jacquot, C.; Pielström, S.; Rebora, S.; Rockwell, G.; Sinclair, S.  (2023). "Tool Criticism in Practice: On Methods, Tools, and Aims of Computational Literary Studies". Digital Humanities Quarterly 17, 2.

• Krämer, S. (2023). "The Cultural Technique of Flattening". Metode 1.

• Küpper, J. (2018). The Cultural Net: Early Modern Drama as a Paradigm. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter.

• Lvoff, B. (2021). "Distant Reading in Russian Formalism and Russian Formalism in Distant Reading". Russian Literature, 122, 29-65.

• Moretti, F. (2013). Distant reading. London: Verso.

• Schöch, C. (2023). "Repetitive research: a conceptual space and terminology of replication, reproduction, revision, reanalysis, reinvestigation and reuse in digital humanities". International Journal of Digital Humanities, 5 (2): 373–403.

• Sobchuk, O. (2023). "Evolution of Modern Literature and Film", in J. Tehrani, J. Kendal, and R. Kendal, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution (online).

• Szemes, B., and Vida, B. (2024) "Tragic and Comical Networks: Clustering Dramatic Genres According to Structural Properties". In M. Andresen and N. Reiter, eds., Computational Drama Analysis: Reflecting on Methods and Interpretations. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter.

• Willand, M., Trilcke, P., Schöch, C., Rißler-Pipka, N., Reiter, N., & Fischer, F. (2017). "Aktuelle Herausforderungen der Digitalen Dramenanalyse". In DHd 2017 Book of Abstracts.

Methodological reflection

• drama vectorisation as an expression of the ’cultural technique of flattening’ (Krämer 2023) typical of DH
  • not as a reductionist attempt to overtly simplify the complexity of theatrical texts
  • rather as a prosecution of formalist morphological thinking with modern computational methods
• interplay between operationalisation and flattening:

Inspiration: https://dlina.github.io/Distant-Reading-Showcase-Poster-DHd2016-Leipzig/

'Irregular' theatres

• e.g. Spanish and English
• influenced by medieval theatre practices
• emphasis on performance
• looser structure

'Regular' theatres

• e.g. French and Italian
• associated with humanist theatre
• meant mostly to be read
• codified structure after Aristotle

Early modern drama aesthetics

• 🇬🇧 : enhanced network connectedness, dispersion of the protagonist role (cf. Algee-Hewitt 2017), increase in female cast, progressive implementation of French liaison des scènes
• 🇩🇪 : shift towards sparser networks, increase in segmentation (Neoclassical influence)
• 🇪🇸 : expanding and more intricately connected dramatic networks, absence of central mediating figures, increase in non-gendered speakers, decreasing drama change rate
• 🇮🇹 : progressive concentration of the protagonist role in
  one or few characters, increase of stage directions (CdA)
• 🇫🇷 : streamlined network models, more stability in stage configurations

Evolutionary trends within the subcorpora