The DraCorOS Training Sessions take place on Monday, 1 September 2025.

Sessions will be taught by: 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.

Venue (Seminar Centre):
Room L115
Seminarzentrum der Freien Universität Berlin
Freie Universität Berlin
Otto-von-Simson-Str. 26
14195 Berlin-Dahlem

Beginners’ Strand

(no previous skills required)

14:00–15:30 · From Dramatic Text to DraCor TEI: XML/TEI Introduction, Encoding Drama in TEI, and Automation of Encoding

(Julia Jennifer Beine, Daniil Skorinkin)

In the first part of this session, we will introduce XML/TEI and discuss why the TEI format is used in Computational Literary Studies. In the second part, we will present different workflows to encode dramatic texts in TEI. We will consider three types of text sources: texts without any markup, texts with basic markup, and texts with advanced markup. We will also discuss how to automate the encoding process and which tools may be used for support. Finally, we will provide a flowchart to help you choose a suitable encoding workflow for your project. (Slides from the session are available here.)

15:30–16:00 · Coffee Break ☕

16:00–17:30 · Simple Analyses with DraCor Data

(Frank Fischer, Peer Trilcke)

We will explore browser-based applications for visualising and analysing plays from the DraCor platform. The focus will be on tools such as Voyant, RAWGraphs, Datawrapper, and Gephi Lite, with a brief outlook on additional resources. Participants are welcome to bring their own use cases, drawing from the more than 4,000 plays available on DraCor. (Slides for the session are here.)

Advanced Strand

(advanced skills in programming and utilising the DraCor API)

14:00–15:30 · Python-based Analysis in DraCor Jupyter Notebooks

(Henny Sluyter-Gäthje, Antonio Rojas Castro)

The focus of this session lies on analysing DraCor data with Python. Using the DraCor Notebooks, we will work on small research questions like analysing the genre distribution of corpora, comparing character speech using the NLP library spacy, or catching the protagonist of a play based on network metrics. Participants are very welcome to share their own research questions!

15:30–16:00 · Coffee Break ☕

16:00–17:30 · Reproducible Research with Docker

(Ingo Börner)

This training session demonstrates how to establish reproducible research workflows using Docker to create local instances of the DraCor infrastructure, enabling researchers to work with fixed, versioned corpus data. Participants will learn to set up and populate a containerized DraCor environment with specific versions of custom corpora, addressing the fundamental challenge that DraCor’s »living corpora« continuously evolve over time, making repeating research difficult. (The Jupyter Notebook for this session is here.)