https://github.com/dracor-org/gerdracor
German Drama Corpus
https://github.com/dracor-org/gerdracor
corpus digital-humanities drama dramatic-texts tei xml
Last synced: 4 months ago
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German Drama Corpus
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/dracor-org/gerdracor
- Owner: dracor-org
- Created: 2016-12-01T17:34:38.000Z (over 9 years ago)
- Default Branch: main
- Last Pushed: 2026-01-13T16:45:57.000Z (5 months ago)
- Last Synced: 2026-01-13T18:43:29.191Z (5 months ago)
- Topics: corpus, digital-humanities, drama, dramatic-texts, tei, xml
- Language: CSS
- Size: 138 MB
- Stars: 10
- Watchers: 9
- Forks: 13
- Open Issues: 3
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
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README
# GerDraCor
## Corpus Description
This is the German Drama Corpus (GerDraCor), a collection of [TEI P5](https://tei-c.org/guidelines/p5/)-encoded German-language plays from the 1500s to the 1940s. The corpus is released under the Creative Commons Zero copyright waiver ([CC0](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/)).
If you want to cite the corpus, please use this publication:
- **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](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4284002).
We started to build the corpus by extracting all plays from TextGrid Repository (TGRep). The source for the versions in TGRep was [zeno.org's](http://www.zeno.org/) text collection. However, TGRep's conversion from zeno.org's proprietary XML to TEI caused some bugs and inconsistencies which we fixed for GerDraCor in a longer process between 2017 and 2019. [All our fixes including enhancements are documented on GerDraCor's Wiki.](https://github.com/dracor-org/gerdracor/wiki/Documentation-for-Correcting-Plays-from-TextGrid-Repository) After this clean-up process, GerDraCor is now in a position to grow by taking on new plays from sources such as Deutsches Textarchiv, Project Gutenberg, Projekt Gutenberg-DE, Wikisource, or Google Books.
GerDraCor is an autonomous corpus and will be maintained independently. Yet it is also integrated into the [dracor.org website](https://dracor.org/), the showcase for our newly introduced **"Programmable Corpora"** concept.
If you just want to download the corpus in its current state in XML-TEI, do this:
`svn export https://github.com/dracor-org/gerdracor/trunk/tei`
### Credits
* Editors: [Frank Fischer](https://lehkost.github.io/), [Peer Trilcke](https://www.uni-potsdam.de/de/lit-19-jhd/peertrilcke/)
* Support during the initial compilation of the corpus from TextGrid Repository: Mathias Göbel, [Dario Kampkaspar](https://www.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/die_bibliothek/ueberuns/organisation/kontakt_details_17792.en.jsp) (Technical University of Darmstadt/ACDH-CH, Vienna)
* Additional encoders: [Erik Renz](https://www.germanistik.uni-rostock.de/personen/wiss-mitarbeitende/erik-renz/) (University of Rostock)
* Bibliographic research: [Lilly Welz](https://www.temporal-communities.de/people/welz/index.html) (Freie Universität Berlin)
* Character annotations: [Nathalie Wiedmer](https://uni-tuebingen.de/forschung/forschungsschwerpunkte/sonderforschungsbereiche/sfb-andere-aesthetik/organisation/mitglieder-alphabetisch/nathalie-wiedmer/) (University of Tübingen), [Janis Pagel](https://janispagel.de/), [Nils Reiter](https://nilsreiter.de/) (both University of Cologne)
### Character Relations
Character relations encode the information provided in the *dramatis personae* and make it machine-readable. This is mainly about family and power relations.
The following relations have been annotated (by [Nathalie Wiedmer et al.](https://quadrama.github.io/publications/Wiedmer2020aa)):
| Relation label | Directed/Undirected | Description |
| ----- | ----- | ------ |
| `parent_of` | directed | One character is a parent of the other |
| `lover_of` | directed | For lovers |
| `related_with` | directed | Other **family** relations (e.g., uncles) |
| `associated_with` | directed | For clearly associated characters (e.g., butlers) |
| `siblings` | undirected | Characters that have at least one parent in common |
| `spouses` | undirected | Characters in marriage (or engaged) |
| `friends` | undirected | Characters marked as being friends |
All relations are marked in XML in the `` element within ``. Directed relations are encoded with an `active` and `passive` attribute where the active part is always the one in front of the relation, if expressed as a sentence. E.g., *Odoardo is parent of Emilia* translates to this:
Undirected relations use the `mutual` attribute to collect all IDs that are part of a relationship:
The label from the table above is contained in the `name` attribute.
## API
An easy way to download the network data (instead of the actual TEI files) is to use our API ([documentation here](https://dracor.org/doc/api)). If you have [jq](https://blog.appoptics.com/jq-json/) installed, it would work like this:
```
for play in `curl 'https://dracor.org/api/corpora/ger' | jq -r ".dramas[] .name"`; do
wget -O "$play".csv https://dracor.org/api/corpora/ger/play/"$play"/networkdata/csv
done
```
The API info page is at `https://dracor.org/api/info`. It also tells you which version of eXist-db we're running on dracor.org.
## Simple Visualisation with R
To take a first look at the distribution of the number of speakers per play over time, you could feed the metadata table into R:
```
library(data.table)
library(ggplot2)
gerdracor <- fread("https://dracor.org/api/corpora/ger/metadata/csv")
ggplot(gerdracor[], aes(x = yearNormalized, y = numOfSpeakers)) + geom_point()
```
Result:
Here is a barplot showing the number of plays per decade (outdated, not containing most recent changes):
## A Bit of History
Until we rebuilt our working corpus under its new name GerDraCor, we've been working with an [intermediary format](https://github.com/dlina/project/tree/master/data/zwischenformat) to conduct [our research](https://dlina.github.io/talks/). This format only held structural information, not the texts themselves. Back then, our research group called itself DLINA (digitally-enabled literary network analysis). Since our focus broadened, we stopped using this name. Our future endeavours will sail under the **Programmable Corpora** flag.
(README last updated on January 21, 2026.)