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What is DraCor?

DraCor (short for Drama Corpora) can be summarised as:

  • Digital infrastructure for European drama. DraCor is an open-access online infrastructure developed for the computational study of European drama ranging from Greco‑Roman antiquity through the 20th century.
  • TEI‑encoded multilingual corpus: It hosts over 4,330 plays (as of August 2025) encoded in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) format, covering 18 languages—primarily European languages such as German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Ukrainian, Ancient Greek, and Latin.
  • Programmable corpora via API: The project exemplifies the concept of “programmable corpora”, offering a documented API that allows programmatic access to texts and metadata, enabling extraction of bespoke data slices.
  • FAIR data compliance: DraCor is designed following FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), facilitating interoperability and sustained reuse by digital humanities researchers.
  • Visualization and network analysis tools: The platform includes tools to generate character co‑occurrence networks, visualize relations within plays, and support stylometric and structural analyses.
  • Flexible data export: Users can retrieve subsets of data—such as individual speeches, stage directions, character metadata or network graphs—in formats like TXT, CSV, RDF, JSON or GEXF via API or download options.

Initiated in 2017 by teams at the University of Potsdam and Freie Universität Berlin (with contributions by scholars such as Peer Trilcke and Frank Fischer), DraCor received the Rahtz TEI Ingenuity Prize in 2022 for its innovative use of TEI infrastructure.