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MeThAL: Towards a macroanalysis of theater in Alsatian

Goals and challenges

The Alsatian dialect theater tradition is based predominantly on popular and humour genres. What are the major trends in this tradition, regarding dramatic technique and character types? What are its major geographic locations? To what an extent do Alsatian dialect plays document the sociolinguistic situation of the period when they were written?

In order to answer these questions and carry out quantitative analyses, a large corpus, representative of the tradition, is required, as well as corpus annotations for the relevant variables: geographical origin of plays and authors, places where the plays take place, their period and genre. Regarding the characters, attributes such as their profession, social status, origin, gender or age must be made available. It is also necessary to formalize the plays' structure, identifying act and scene divisions, characters' speech and stage directions.

Our project’s first goal is creating such a corpus, encoded in the TEI format (Text Encoding Initiative), whose Performance module covers the types of annotations we’re interested in. We’re working on a representative collection of plays, which were recently digitized by the Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire (Bnu) in Strasbourg. We’re currently performing OCR on the plays and their TEI encoding.

The corpus thus created will allow a distant reading or macroanalysis approach to Alsatian theater. Such approaches have been applied successfully to the major European dramatic traditions, as shown in a 2017 special issue of the Revue d’Historiographie du Théâtre. However, such analyses are still impossible for Alsatian, given lack of an appropriate digital corpus. The MeThAL projects seeks to make up for this lack of resources.

To that end, we will apply natural language processing and document representation techniques, besides web technologies which will contribute to corpus navigability.

Challenges

The huge orthographic variety of Alsatian presents specific challenges for Natural Language Processing (NLP), as is the case for any low-resource language. These challenges highlight needs which are only partially addressed by existing text analysis tools, mainly geared towards majority languages. The project will exploit and contribute to the resources created by the RESTAURE project, on NLP for France’s regional languages.

Outputs

Publications and contributions to conferences

  • Pablo Ruiz, Carole Werner, Delphine Bernhard, Pascale Erhart, Dominique Huck. (2021). MeThAL : Ressources numériques pour une relecture du théâtre en alsacien. Poster presented at 10 ans avec CAHIER : Des corpus d’auteurs pour les humanités numériques à leur exploitation numérique, June 2021, Bordeaux, France. ⟨10.5281/zenodo.4908212⟩. ⟨hal-03255403⟩

  • Pablo Ruiz, Carole Werner. (2021). Exploration du théâtre alsacien à travers ses listes de personnages pendant la période 1870-1940. Humanistica 2021 :27-29, Rennes, France. ⟨10.5281/zenodo.4762732⟩ ⟨hal-03226579⟩ [slides]

  • Pablo Ruiz, Delphine Bernhard, Carole Werner. (2020). Création d’un corpus FAIR de théâtre en alsacien et normalisation de variétés non-contemporaines. 2èmes journées scientifiques du Groupement de Recherche Linguistique Informatique Formelle et de Terrain (LIFT) : 32-43. Montrouge, France. ⟨10.5281/zenodo.4323301⟩ ⟨hal-03047152⟩ [slides]

  • Pablo Ruiz, Delphine Bernhard, Pascale Erhart, Dominique Huck, Carole Werner. (2020). MeThAL : Vers une macroanalyse du théâtre en alsacien. Humanistica 2020, Bordeaux, France. ⟨10.5281/zenodo.3788019⟩. ⟨hal-02564694⟩

Presentations

  • LiLPa Lab seminar, December 2019: [pdf]

Corpus

You can explore the corpus (read the plays, filter according to plays' and character attributes) at its navigation interface: https://methal.eu/ui/

The TEI sources are in the following repository:

//// comment out as now point to interface === Read the plays

  • See section [read] to read already encoded plays (##nbrPieces plays at this point)