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Better Affordances

The purpose of TEI encoding is to make explicit and hence accessible to a processor distinctions within a text which are likely to be of interest or importance when attempting to analyse the text, individually or by comparison with others. In the case of my 80 play subset of Lacy Acting Edition, the markup already distinguishes dramatic structure, speeches and stage directions, paragraphs and verse lines, and occasional outbursts of typographic salience. I say “occasional” because these transcriptions do not aim to capture every variation of printing or layout: they represent only potentially significant variation such as italicized words within a speech. Usage of small caps or italics elsewhere is ignored, as is the lineation of the source. Pagination is retained, however, since it makes it possible to link the transcription to page images. The transcription includes the whole of the printed source including prefatory matter such as cast lists and title pages.

The cast lists are particularly useful as a source of information about the characters represented in the play, though these are not always entirely consistent with lists one might obtain by simply looking at the indications of speaker in the running text. The same role may be indicated by different speaker codes, for example. Some roles appearing in a cast list are not identifiably present in the speaker list, either because they are non-speaking roles, or because they are just not there. Quite frequently a speaker label associates a speech with more than one role – either explicitly by giving multiple names or implicitly by using phrases such as “Omnes” or “All the Women” or “Both”. And there are occasions, notably in the representation of musical numbers, where the speaker must be inferred by inspecting the dramatic context.

To handle this, the TEI (and DraCor) proposes the use of specific metadata elements to hold a list of distinct roles. For example:


Each <person> element here carries a unique identifier (“L0321_M2” for example) and contains within it one or more <persName> elements indicating the speaker names used in the body of the text for this role. The role of “Undertone” for example is indicated by a speaker value “Under.” most of the time, but there is also one “Undertone.”

Within the body of the text individual speeches (<sp> elements) are associated with the appropriate <person> by means of the @who attribute:



To produce this encoding, I used a script (doPartix.xsl) which extracted relevant components from each playtext, and saved them in a participant desciption file. The script extracted each <role> found in a castList/castItem and created a <person> element, with an xml:id value derived by concatenatintg the play’s identifier with an indication of gender and a sequence number. The form of role name used in the castItem was also included as a child <persName type=’role’>. The script then added to the file a <persName type=’spkr’> element for each distinct value found in the text. The next step had to be done by hand, since many of the speaker names were present in ambiguous or abbreviated form: it consisted simply of deciding under which <person> a <persName type=’spkr’> should be grouped, and moving it there. In the process I identified a few non-speaking roles, some speakers not listed as roles, and many multi-person speakers, to which I gave a special identifier. Finally, I ran a second script (addWho.xsl) which used this revised participant description file to add @who values into the original text. Validating this enhanced file showed up a few cases where the speaker code had not been matched, and rather more where no speaker label existed in the source: again these were simply corrected by hand.

As a result of all this effort, I now have some numbers to share. In the 80 plays now in TEI form, there are 36,209 distinct speeches and 19,770 stage directions. 305 speeches are attributed to multiple speakers, but leaving them to one side I find 24,887 speeches spoken by male characters – roughly two-thirds– and only 11,066 attributed to female characters.

Much more to come when I have worked out how to feed this data into the DraCor toolkit…


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
foxglove (7 août 2025). Better Affordances. Foxglove. Consulté le 13 janvier 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/14gu1


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