This is the corpus explorer for the MeThAL project (Towards a Macroanalysis of Theater in Alsatian) at Université de Strasbourg's LiLPa lab (Linguistique, Langues et Parole). Our corpus is composed of theater plays in Alsatian varieties, covering mostly the 1871-1940 period, although less complete records for earlier plays are also available.

A main project goal is creating a large TEI-encoded corpus of plays in Alsatian, besides collecting plays' metadata and adding new annotations. For the initial project period (2021-2022) we are aiming for 50 TEI plays (400,000 tokens) for which no electronic text was previously available.

Whereas large TEI-encoded corpora that enable quantitative analyses exist for major European dramatic traditions, no such corpus was available so far for Alsatian theater. Our project is thus a first step towards making macroanalytically inspired analyses possible for the Alsatian tradition.

A main source for our work is the collection of image-mode Alsatian plays at Numistral, Strasbourg's Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire's digital library. We are also working with Wikisource materials and create additional digitizations when necessary. We perform OCR on digital sources and produce TEI based on OCR output, after a manual correction.

Text and metadata sources

• Numistral: Théâtre alsacien (digital library collection).
• Wikisource: A. Lustig's Sämtliche Werke, 2. Band: Theater. (1909). Transcribed by MireilleLibmann.
• Gall (1974). Le théâtre populaire alsacien au XIXe siècle. Strasbourg: Istra.
• Huck (2005). Le « Theâtre alsacien de Strasbourg » et la production dramaturgique de ses fondateurs (1898-1914). In Leveratto et al. (eds.) Culture et histoire des spectacles en Alsace et Lorraine : De l'annexion à la décentralisation (1871-1946). Peter Lang.
• TAS (1923). Théâtre Alsacien Strasbourg. 1898-1923. 25^ème anniversaire.

License

Our annotations (plays' metadata, characters' attributes, TEI encoding) are licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

Numistral material's original license is the Licence Ouverte/Open Licence

Wikisource material's original license is CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Credits

Project lead and manager for this website: Pablo Ruiz Fabo

Involvement in the project's corpus exploration interface:

• UI development: Pablo Ruiz Fabo (maintainer), Salomé Klein
• Metadata: Main contributors have been Barbara Hoff, Audrey Li-Thiao-Té, Pablo Ruiz Fabo, Carole Werner
• TEI versions: In the sources,

   <respStmt> 

  elements in each document indicate contributors. Encoding much facilitated by sequence labeling models by Andrew Briand, and scripts using symbolic methods by Hoda Chouaib, Kévin Michoud and Pablo Ruiz Fabo. OCR was based on scripts by Delphine Bernhard.
• OCR corrections: Lena Camillone, Hoda Chouaib, Audrey Deck, Barbara Hoff, Valentine Jung, Audrey Li-Thiao-Té, Vedisha Toory (secondarily Delphine Bernhard, Pablo Ruiz Fabo).

All MeThAL project participants are listed here. We specially thank our interns.