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Dramatic Analysis is the scholarly examination of the structure, themes, characters, and language of dramatic texts. It involves interpreting the underlying meanings and artistic choices within plays, considering historical, cultural, and social contexts to enhance understanding of the work's impact and significance in the theatrical canon.

Maria Knebel is one of the most influential scholars in the field of Drama Analysis. Her work with Stanislavsky has been foundational in the history of theatre: she devised the method of Action Analysis to read the play as a score of...more

Maria Knebel is one of the most influential scholars in the field of Drama Analysis. Her work with Stanislavsky has been foundational in the history of theatre: she devised the method of Action Analysis to read the play as a score of actions to be executed by the actors. This paper aims at encoding Knebel's principles in a formal representation using a computational ontology (Drammar) to prove its expressiveness and to test its efficacy in a production point of view. As an example we use Knebel's analysis of Pogodin's "Kremlin Chimes".

This dissertation aims at equipping Spanish Philology with novel methods, tools, and proofs of concept to facilitate Digital Humanities studies of Spanish plays. In particular, it develops methods to analyse Spanish Golden Age versified...more

This dissertation aims at equipping Spanish Philology with novel methods, tools, and proofs of concept to facilitate Digital Humanities studies of Spanish plays. In particular, it develops methods to analyse Spanish Golden Age versified plays. It departs from the theoretical grounds of dramatology, poetry, and phonology to formalise its elements as algorithms and data structures suitable for implementation as software. It resorts to Digital Humanities not as much as a methodological framework but as a target audience for the outcomes. Since the formalisation's suitability is tested by translating it into actual computer programmes, the design considers programming techniques, natural language processing and computational linguistics. The approach presented in this work intends to expedite data retrieval and classification. Firstly, it proposes ontologies and classes of textual elements in Golden Age plays and their interrelations; secondly, it describes automatic processing methods to extract them; finally, it explores how to organise the resulting information into data structures suitable for further digital analysis.

This thesis is concerned with Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) from two perspectives. Firstly, it analyses the problem of the development of IDS systems and defines behavioral requirements for the agents in those systems. The first...more

This thesis is concerned with Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS)
from two perspectives. Firstly, it analyses the problem of the development of IDS systems and defines behavioral requirements for the agents in those systems.
The first part is concluded with a proposal of a minimalistic affect-modulated architecture that can be used to develop agents for medium-sized IDS systems.
Secondly, two working IDS systems built on top of the architecture are introduced and used in the following part of the thesis that researches the problem
of an automatic analysis of story spaces generated by IDS systems. A general methodology of analysis is introduced, implemented and tested on the domains of three working IDS systems.

What is theatre? "Theatre is a crucible of civilisation. It is a place for human communication", said Victor Hugo solving the dilemma of defining theatre. Patric Pavis, the Professor for Theatre Studies at the University of Kent, has...more

What is theatre? "Theatre is a crucible of civilisation. It is a place for human communication", said Victor Hugo solving the dilemma of defining theatre. Patric Pavis, the Professor for Theatre Studies at the University of Kent, has managed to tread the path of human communication in his Toward a Theory of Culture and Mise en Scène. This theory comes amid a conspicuous absence of intercultural exchange in the western theatre. To delineate, Mise en Scène "is a mediation between different cultural backgrounds, traditions and methods of acting", in which the playwright becomes both an author and a director. It stipulates giving up abiding by all traditional theories that depend on no intercultural exchange. Knowing that "Theatre is made of traditions, conventions, institutions, habits, which are permanent in time"-Eugenio Barba, in contemporary mise en scène the artistic codes decode the cultural codes and vice versa. The apprehension of some specific artistic codes paves the way to perceive the cultural codes as well. Thus, mise en scène is an eminent theory that evokes copious speculations and techniques.

The study of dramatic plays has long relied on qualitative methods to analyze character interactions, making little assumption about the structural patterns of communication involved. Our approach bridges NLP and literary studies,...more

The study of dramatic plays has long relied on qualitative methods to analyze character interactions, making little assumption about the structural patterns of communication involved. Our approach bridges NLP and literary studies, enabling scalable, data-driven analysis of interaction patterns and power structures in drama. We propose a novel method to supplement addressee identification in tragedies using Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike conventional Social Network Analysis (SNA) approaches, which often diminish dialogue dynamics by relying on co-occurrence or adjacency heuristics, our LLM-based method accurately records directed speech acts, joint addresses, and listener interactions. In a preliminary evaluation of an annotated multilingual dataset of 14 scenes from nine plays in four languages, our top-performing LLM (i.e., Llama3.3-70B) achieved an F1-score of 88.75% (P = 94.81%, R = 84.72%), an exact match of 77.31%, and an 86.97% partial match with human annotations, where partial match indicates any overlap between predicted and annotated receiver lists. Through automatic extraction of speaker-addressee relations, our method provides preliminary evidence for the potential scalability of SNA for literary analyses, as well as insights into power relations, influence, and isolation of characters in tragedies, which we further visualize by rendering social network graphs.