Marika V Lagercrantz

The purpose

The purpose that was formulated in the application has been our guide for the work throughout the entire project period: To make copyright-free drama freely available as a digital resource for theatres, universities and other institutions of higher education, as well as the general public with an interest in theatre.

However, this proved to be a task that was far from simple or clear-cut. The various steps involved in making the plays accessible posed for us a series of methodological as well as technical questions concerning what should be made available, how and why. Consequently, this project has not only made plays available for future research. The process of making these plays available has, in itself, developed into its own research process.

In our application we sought funding in order to:

Make an exhaustive inventory of copyright-free drama

At the time the project started in 2009, we began making an inventory of works by male playwrights. Random samples from the card catalogues showed, however, that the non-excluding method that was used in making an inventory of plays by women needed adaptation to the male playwrights. This is because the latter proved to be on a far bigger scale than the former. In order to be able to build up a coherent and representative corpus of Swedish drama from the 1600s-1900s, we had to make a selection. Thus, we were faced with a methodological dilemma. However, by being careful to take into account the gender and canon-critical perspectives which had guided our inventory of drama by female playwrights, we were able to maintain the same focus. The goal of the inventory was still to make visible the gender ratios in the field of drama, and to highlight plays which, despite being successful in their contemporary periods, had been excluded by posterity. Furthermore, the overall principle for the selection remained the same: copyright-free drama in printed first editions.

We began with a marginalised and also very much in-demand genre: older plays for children. The collection of 144 children's plays from the mid-1800s to the1910s revealed an interesting field with both female and male authorship. From the 1600s, there is a handful of school plays which, with their directly moralizing and burlesque-style approaches, reflect the theatrical practices of the time. From the varied range of pieces from the 1700s, we have made a selection of 20 comedies, tragedies and history plays. In making the inventory, it became apparent how strongly plays by men grew in volume during the 19th century. With the help of repertoire lists from the period, we were able to make a selection that gave nuance to the canon. The most frequently performed Swedish originals formed an interesting set of "hit plays" in which even well-known dramatists were represented, but with plays that are not usually included in works of literary survey. Thus, the contemporary audiences' tastes were allowed to hold sway over posterity's excluding arbiters of taste.

August Strindberg is part of the literary canon. One of the reasons for making his plays available here, too, was that many of his plays are actually relatively unexplored and very rarely performed. Another reason is that, while later critical editions are readily available, first editions are inaccessible rarities. In addition, Dramawebben's published versions proved to be useful as perspicacious materials for comparison with the critical editions of Strindberg's collected works. An additional argument for publishing Strindberg's plays on Dramawebben was that the demand was expected to grow during the Year of Strindberg, 2012. By January 2012, all 65 of Strindberg's works could be found published on Dramawebben.

Publish the drama in full text

Digitisation and full-text publication occasioned a series of unforeseen technical problems. It has been possible to solve these problems with the help of new software and collaboration with other archives. An additional resource was brought into the project on a part-time basis for training and support in digitisation, image processing and publication. For scanning and OCR of the facsimiles, specialist external expertise was procured. This proved to be both an efficient and reliable solution. During the period, 300 male plays have been catalogued, 350 have been digitised and published in full text. Of these, we scanned and imported with OCR approximately 200 plays.

Publish a digital, uniform and descriptive catalogue of plays

The format for the cataloguing has been further developed during the project period. When we began to make the plays available in full text, this time-consuming cataloguing, which was based on each play being read so that it could then be described in its catalogue record, might have appeared to be redundant. However, since older Swedish drama is relatively little researched, we found that it was still justified to widen the cataloguing to include summaries of the press reviews of first performances. Thus, the material was presented not only through our readings but also through the eyes of contemporary experiences of the very first stage interpretations. During the project period, Dramawebben has become LIBRIS's first digital archive. After training in the project, Dramawebben's digital full-text publications have been catalogued in LIBRIS. This gives the project an important integration with library databases and increases accessibility for users.

Develop collaborations with relevant archives and other databases

A great deal of time has been spent on initiating and trialling various forms of collaboration and cooperation with archives, libraries and other institutions that work with text digitisation. In 2009, a fruitful collaboration with the Svenska barnboksinstitutet was carried out. We were given free access to their archives and could digitize the plays and from their collection volumes and magazines. In return, SBI received backup copies of the material. Their fragile play material is now freely available on Dramawebben. During the project period, cooperation has also been established with other archives such as Kungliga Teatrarnas Arkiv and the Musik och teaterbiblioteket. The project was also able to purchase digitization of a large body of material from the older collections of drama held in the National Library of Sweden.The editors at Litteraturbanken and Språkbanken have been an invaluable support in technical matters. In return, we have been able to share with them our digitized files of older drama. At Språkbanken, there is a pilot corpus of older drama accessible for searches.

Ensure availability to user groups through active information efforts and the development of the database interface

www.dramawebben.se was launched in December 2009. This meant that the catalogue of plays that had previously resided on the website of the National Dramaturgiate got its own Web address. The material was now presented via a pedagogical interface with refined search functions.
That the drama thus became far more accessible is reflected in the site visitor figures. On 20 January 2010, the website had 16 visitors per day, on the same date the following year, 49 visitors, and two years later, 109 visitors. These figures are largely due to the regular and frequent contacts with representatives from various user groups that have emerged since 2006. Having Riksteatern as the grant administrator has also provided a natural interface with the theatrical world. Theatres have started using Dramawebben's processable full-text files as performance scripts to an increasing extent. The knowledge about older Swedish drama that has been built up in the project has not only been in demand by theatres but also within educational circles. In addition to regular lectures at various tertiary institutions, we have held courses where the students have been asked to evaluate Dramawebben as a digital resource. During the Year of Strindberg (2012), Dramawebben participated in the City of Stockholm's "August Portal" and in the wiki "August 2012", a resource for teachers at secondary school and upper secondary school. The project period concluded with a conference in February 2012. Various researchers presented their work with the materials from Dramawebben's corpus. These were subsequently published on the website as articles.

Create a stable and independent organisation for the operational phase in which the material is available, and cooperation with other archives is maintained

During the project period, the issue of the future of the project has been ever-present. In our contacts with other stakeholders in the cultural heritage field, we have tried to ascertain what role Dramawebben can and should take on. Dramawebben is currently one of the cultural heritage institutions that delivers data to K-samsök at Riksantikvarieämbetet. In this way, its information is given exposure, along with 2,500 cultural heritage institutions, in the European portal Europeana. In 2012, together with Språkbanken, the project received funding from Vetenskapsrådet to develop Dramawebben over three years into a piece of advanced research infrastructure. This collaboration with Språkbanken guarantees the project cutting-edge expertise in the processing of the texts that will be carried out: semantic XML coding according to the international standard TEI. Thus, Dramawebben will become a bridge between the international field of Digital humanities and Swedish humanities research. Riksteatern is the grant administrator. With support from institutions such as Språkbanken, Litteraturbanken, K-samsök, Digisam, SND, the Kungliga Teatrarnas Arkiv, Kungliga biblioteket, LIBRIS and Riksteatern, Dramawebben has developed towards becoming a stable and independent organisation.