Drama Critiques

Drama Critiques gathers 10 years (2010 – 2020) of London contemporary theatre reviews. By focusing on two literary communities (journalists on the one hand and bloggers on the other hand), this corpus enables one to examine the poetical and political discourse journalistic and digital reviewers build. While our initial corpus is composed of more than 43 000 theatre reviews, the version made available here is constituted of 36 766 reviews. This is explained by the fact that we still have not received the authorisation of some of the bloggers to publish their data in open access. To have more information about our project, the different analyses of the corpus can be found here: https://dramacritiques.com/en/home/

The corpus based on journalism was created thanks to Theatre Record, a paper magazine originally created by the English critic Ian Herbert. Theatre Record reprints in full all the national drama critics’ reviews of the latest productions in and out of London. Published every two weeks in England since January 1981, it is in January 2019 that its archives were digitized thanks to Julian Oddy (https://www.theatrerecord.com/). We have selected 23 newspapers in total which correspond to 21 717 theatre reviews. All of them were initially available in a PDF format. After having converted all the files in a textual format, a massive work of automatic and manual corrections was done on each of the files. This task represents more than 1050 hours of work.

The corpus based on blog platforms is constituted of the most popular 28 blog platforms on the Internet. They can be divided into two sub-categories: collective blog platforms on the one hand, and individual blog platforms on the other. Either these digital platforms are run by a publisher who invites other reviewers to post on his website, or the publisher publishes all of his reviews himself. In both cases, these authors are not paid for their activity, the content of their blog does not have a printed version and is completely free. In this version there are 21 blogs, or 15 049 reviews. All of them were automatically extracted thanks to web scraping techniques before being corrected (250 hours of work). You can discover more about each blog here: https://dramacritiques.com/en/categories-2/the-corpus/