DraCor Summit 2025
The DraCor Summit took place in Berlin from 1 until 5 September 2025. Hosted by the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Potsdam, this five-day event brought together researchers in computational literary studies, cultural analytics, and adjacent fields to present and discuss their research and corpus projects.
⚠️ Update (October 2025): The Summit website has entered maintenance mode. Its content remains available for reference.
DraCor – short for Drama Corpora – is a digital ecosystem dedicated to the study of drama from antiquity to the 20th century. The multilingual community project follows the principles of open science. We currently maintain 28 drama corpora encoded in TEI with a total of over 4,000 annotated full texts of plays in 22 languages. It is the basis for a very vibrant research landscape around the computational research of drama corpora. Between early 2024 and the week of the Summit, more than 60 monographs and scholarly articles have been published worldwide that work with DraCor data.
The DraCor Summit aimed to provide an overview of the current state of an important field of computational literary studies and a space for the exchange of experiences. Various formats were offered for this purpose, ranging from workshops, lectures, discussion rounds, through to hackathon sessions. There was no registration fee for the conference. For researchers without their own funding, there was the option of applying for a travel grant.
The five days focused on different areas:
- On Monday, 1 September 2025, we offered DraCorOS Training Sessions on topics such as corpus building in the context of DraCor and working with the DraCor API. On Monday evening, the Summit was officially opened with a keynote by Clarisse Bardiot.
- On Tuesday, 2 September 2025, the first DraCor Corpora Conference took place. It featured 18 presentations focusing on the achievements and challenges involved in developing and maintaining individual corpora. Many current – and future – corpus maintainers shared insights into their work.
- On Wednesday, 3 September 2025, we saw the Workshop on Computational Drama Analysis, focusing on the latest advances in computational and quantitative methods for the study of drama.
- On Thursday, 4 September 2025, the DraCor Barcamp provided the framework for an open, participant-driven unconference. The agenda was shaped shape by the audience.
- On Friday, 5 September 2025, we organised a co-working opportunity for further pursuing and developing ideas inspired by the DraCor Summit.
Venue: The DraCor Summit took place at the Freie Universität Berlin.
General registration for the DraCor Summit opened on 6 June 2025 and remained open until 20 August 2025.
Local organisers: Julia Jennifer Beine, Ingo Börner, Frank Fischer, Luca Giovannini, Carsten Milling, Antonio Rojas Castro, Mark Schwindt, Daniil Skorinkin, Henny Sluyter-Gäthje, Peer Trilcke, Laura Untner.
How to contact us: info@dracor.org
Student assistants: Julia Cardoso Espindola, Tabeer Khilji, Leonid Nezhinsky, Stephan Schwarz, EnDe Tang, Lilly Welz, Roya Zendebudie.
The official event poster, including the detailed schedule, was uploaded to Zenodo: doi:10.5281/zenodo.16919640.
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Acknowledgements:
In cooperation with the Cluster of Excellence »Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective«, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation).
The DraCor Summit is co-organised by the project »DraCorOS. Fostering Open Science in Digital Humanities«. We acknowledge the OSCARS project, which has received funding from the European Commission’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101129751.
In cooperation with the Chair of Digital Humanities at the Freie Universität Berlin.
In cooperation with the Network for Digital Humanities at the University of Potsdam.