Detecting Small Worlds in a Corpus of Thousands of Theater Plays
Peer Trilcke, Evgeniya Ustinova, Ingo Börner, Frank Fischer, Carsten Milling · 2024
Although homogenized TEI corpora of theater plays from different languages are becoming more and more available, research on plays with a comparative angle is still rare in the field of Computational Literary Studies (CLS). At the same time, approaches of formal network analysis in particular bear huge potential for comparative research due to their modeling of texts as asemantic structures. An attempt to integrate the paradigm of such a formal analysis with general network research on the one hand and literary history on the other hand is the approach of a typification of networks with respect to structural properties such as the the “Small World” concept. However, studies have so far remained limited to smaller and monolingual corpora. In this study, we report on the implementation of different operationalizations of the “Small World” concept and their applications to a corpus of almost 3000 plays. Looking at the results of these analyses, we examine how the different operationalizations of the “Small World” concept relate to each other and discuss how they could be used for a network-based typology of dramatic forms. We finally develop initial ideas for a network-grounded history of dramatic forms in a transnational perspective.