Workshop on Computational Drama Analysis: Achievements and Opportunities

The workshop is part of the DraCor Summit 2025. It will take place on Wednesday, 3 September 2025.

The analysis of drama through computational and quantitative methods has come a long way from first pioneering efforts of figures such as Boris Yarkho, Solomon Marcus, or Hartmut Ilsemann, and now represents a major research strand within Computational Literary Studies. The maturity of the field was demonstrated in the first edition of the Workshop on Computational Drama Analysis, held in Cologne in September 2022 and whose contributions were recently published (Andresen and Reiter 2024).

Three years on, we aim to convene again to give an overview of the current state of computer-aided drama analysis. What new achievements have been made? Which obstacles still need to be overcome? To answer these questions, the workshop invites scholars working with and/or critically reflecting on formal, quantitative or digital methods for analysing drama to discuss the current state of the field and present new perspectives for the future.

The workshop is organised as part of the DraCor Summit 2025 (1–4 September 2025). Therefore, contributions using corpora, data or tools developed within the DraCor project (Fischer et al. 2019) are particularly welcome, but this is not a prerequisite.

More broadly, we are interested in contributions addressing the following topics:

  • Application of computational methods for drama analysis, such as topic modelling, stylometry, network analysis, sentiment or emotion analysis
  • Critical reflection on their deployment within literary studies, in particular with respect to questions of generalisability, interpretability and reproducibility of results
  • Development and application of language processing methods in regard to character speech or stage directions
  • Exploring cultural evolution perspectives for drama history by means of corpus-based analyses or classifications
  • Theoretical perspectives on the application of digital methods in drama studies
  • Exploitation of linked open data and metadata analysis
  • LLM approaches to drama (history)

We invite the submission of short abstracts (up to 500 words) on any of the above-mentioned or closely related topics by 6 May 2025. A decision on the acceptance to the workshop will be made by the workshop organisers. Submissions should be in English and do not need to be anonymised (open peer review).

Prior to the workshop, the accepted abstracts need to be extended into full papers (4000–6000 words), which will be collected in a conference reader provided to participants before the workshop. A template (word/odt/latex) will be provided to the authors of accepted abstracts.

Revised full papers will be later published as peer-reviewed conference proceedings; further details will follow. For the specific deadlines, please see the timeline below.

  • 6 May 2025: Deadline for abstracts (up to 500 words)
  • until 26 May 2025: Notification of acceptance
  • 10 August 2025: Deadline for full papers (4000–6000 words)
  • 3 September 2025: Workshop
  • end of 2025: Deadline for revised papers

Please send your abstract in PDF format to info@dracor.org by 6 May 2025, stating “submission drama workshop” in the subject line.

Organisers of the Computational Drama Analysis Workshop: Luca Giovannini, Daniil Skorinkin (University of Potsdam)