French Classical Drama: Topics and Subgenres

This dataset consists of a table describing 5841 samples from French Classical drama, their subgenre, form and other metadata, as well as the scores of 60 different topics. Each topic is illustrated in the table only through its three most frequent words. 

The dataset was created for and used in the following paper: Schöch, Christof. “Topic Modeling Genre: An Exploration of French Classical and Enlightenment Drama”, Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no. 2 (2017): §1-53. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/2/000291/000291.html. 

From the paper: "The collection of plays used for the research presented here is a subset of the Théâtre classique collection, defined by the following criteria: Only plays from the period between 1630 and 1789 were included, because the collection contains only a comparatively small number of plays for the decades before and after these dates. Plays have only been included if they have between three and five acts, effectively excluding a certain number of one-act plays, in order for the plays to have a similar length and a comparable plot structure. Finally, all the plays included belong to one of the following subgenres: comedy, tragedy or tragicomedy. For most of the other relevant genres, only a relatively small number of examples is available. These criteria resulted in a collection of 391 plays (150 comedies, 189 tragedies, and 52 tragicomedies in verse or in prose), corresponding to approximately 5.6 million word tokens or 31 MB of plain text. For the purposes of this study, the plays have been split into smaller segments, resulting in 5840 documents used for Topic Modeling (see details below)." 

Note that the full texts are not included here, but more data is available and linked to in the paper.