Drama Critiques’ Database

Abstract

Drama Critiques’ dataset was produced as part of Mylène Maignant’s PhD project at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ulm) between 2018 and 2022. Her research aims to explore the reception of contemporary London theatre (2010 to 2020) by analysing a large corpus based on the reviews written by two distinct groups of theatre critics: the journalistic one on the one hand, and the digital one on the other hand (bloggers). By relying partly on the data made available by Theatre Record (https://www.theatrerecord.com/) and by automatically extracting the content of 28 blogs, we built a corpus constituting more than 40,000 theatre reviews. Only 36,000 are open access, as some of the bloggers have not given their authorisation yet. The purpose of this data collection consisted of exploring the similarities and differences between these two literary communities. We were interested in better understanding the cultural discourse both journalists and bloggers construct. Given the amount of data, we relied on digital technologies to investigate this field. Using various digital techniques, such as computational linguistics, sentiment analysis, and Geographic Information Systems, we conducted a number of different analyses to map this cultural phenomenon. If some publications have already tackled the literary theme of English digital theatre criticism, none of them have examined it from a computational perspective. Drama Critiques’ dataset is then the first corpus which not only offers so many contemporary reviews based on journalists and bloggers’ publications, but which also proposes a study of its content (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6799656).