Modelling a Digital Text Archive for Theatre Studies -- The Viennese Theatre Corpus

The submitted paper gives an overview of the
recently founded project Viennese Theatre
Corpus (VTC), a sub-project within the wide range of work undertaken by the Austrian Academy Corpus
research group at the Austrian Academy of Sciences
in Vienna. In general the presentation will deal with the specific content mark up of theatre-related materials making use of XML and discuss the application of new technologies and the possibilities of advanced research
methods for the complex and unique historical and
socio-political situation of theatre and its language
spoken on stage in Vienna during the 19th century.
Focusing on the Viennese theatre of the 19th century , the playwright Johann Nepomuk Nestroy (1801-1862), is the centre of interest and represents the main starting point for the development of the corpus. Johann Nestroy dominated the commercial stage as actor-dramatist for nearly thirty years in the Austrian theatre of the 19th
century and wrote about 80 plays. Using different
registers of Viennese German ranging from stagy literary German to colloquial Viennese, the work of this supreme comic dramatist is full of allusion, vivid metaphor and cynical criticism. Emphasising linguistic inventiveness
his comedies reflect a deep-rooted discontent with
moral double standards, static and mendacious society, false friendship and unfounded prejudices.
The Historical-Critical Edition of the Collected Plays
of Nestroy, which appeared between 1924 and 1930,
published by Otto Rommel and Fritz Brukner represents
the core text of this theatre corpus. With the aim
to provide a structured overview of the critical and
historical reception of Nestroy’s work and a valuable collection of different registers of language used on the stage of the Viennese popular theatre, a large amount of contemporary dramas from others of the 19th century like Friedrich Kaiser, Carl Elmar, Carl Giugno and Alois Berla will be incorporated. Furthermore historical and socio-economic descriptions, press criticism, texts from the theatre censorship of this period, legal publications and memoirs of famous actors and stage directors offer a well-assorted and wide-ranging collection of different text types.
In its function as a main place for entertainment and
social contact, the theatre was expanding in this period.
In general the Viennese public was used to about
thirty new premieres a year and new plays and new
productions in European capitals like London and Paris led to a very rapid production and exchange of theatre texts. As a consequence, translations and adaptations of English and French plays reached the Austrian capital
very quickly, often in pirated editions. Therefore
Nestroy’s work was highly influenced by the literary
production of other European countries. Works
by Charles Dickens, Eugène Scribe, Paul de Kock,
Dupeuty, Bayard as well as Varin served him as
stimulation or models for his own plays and for this reason the incorporation of a wide selection of Nestroy’s sources from English and French literature is planned.
The challenge for the development of a specific content
mark up due to this diversity of text types and
language resources is one of the main topics of the paper.
The paper will briefly illustrate the annotation system
which is used for the Viennese Theatre Corpus,
discuss the scope of XML for dramatic texts and
illustrate the incorporation of the critical appendix of the printed version of Nestroy’s Collected Plays. Due
to the contradiction between performed speech, the
action on stage and the subsequent publication as printed
text, drama is often structurally complicated. The
paper will address the dominant question how XML and cognate technologies can help to structure a play, to illustrate the underlying dramatic composition and its use as an analytical tool by means of a specific
semantic tagging strategy rather than as a simple
archiving solution.
The VTC, a thematically oriented text corpus, will
provide access to a variety of original source documents and secondary material. In consideration of the special textual and material requirements of theatrical works the paper will finally discuss the potential contribution of this specific corpus of Viennese plays of the 19th century
to scholarly knowledge within the wide range of
philological, historical and literary research domains.