The Intangible Nature of Drama Documents

Abstract

As a pervasive form of artistic expression through ages and media, drama features a twofold nature of its tangible manifestations (theatrical performances, movies, books, etc.) and its intangible abstraction (the story of Cinderella underlying Disney movie and Perrault's fable). The encoding of the intangible drama abstraction of drama documents is relevant for the preservation of cultural heritage and the didactics and research on drama documents. This paper addresses the task of encoding the notion of intangible story abstraction from the drama documents. The reference model is provided by a computational ontology that formally encodes the elements that characterize a drama, for purposes of semantic linking and inclusion in annotation schemata. By providing a formal expression posited between drama as work and its manifestations, the ontology-based representation is compliant with the model of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR).

The ontology of drama

“…Drammar is part of a larger interdisciplinary research initiative, brought about for more than a decade, aimed at collecting data about drama through the annotation of a corpus of dramatic works. With respect to this initiative, Drammar provides the core of a crowdsourcing workflow developed for alleviating the task of annotating drama by experts who do not have a background in formal ontologies (Lombardo et al, 2017b). The ultimate goal of annotation is twofold: on the one side, it is aimed at collecting ground truth data about drama; on the other side, it provides the way to verify against data the knowledge encoded in the ontology, thus possibly evolving the ontology itself towards more effective and accurate accounts of drama, informed on its manifestations.…”

“…The encoding of a dramatic work consists in the identification within the work of the individual entities formalized by the ontology Drammar and of their consequent instantiation; this encoding proceeds from an interpretation process that analyzes the text and lists the incidents that occur in it. Lombardo et al (2017b) argued that Drammar can encode the abstraction of drama into a digital item, and showed how the obtained representation can support different conceptualizations of drama, being theory-neutral, oriented to the preservation of drama as intangible cultural heritage. Figure 5 provides an overview of the structure of the nunnery scene (the RDF graph of the example can be found in Appendix C).…”

“…Its consistency has been checked against the annotation of drama (i.e., the encoding in Drammar of the content of dramatic works) and the derived visualization, employed by scholars for purposes of didactics and research. introduced a graphical interface for the annotation and visualization of drama that we applied to the analysis of Stanislavski's Action Analysis in Albert et al (2016); Lombardo et al (2015b) coupled an earlier release of the ontological representation with a rule-based calculation of characters' emotions, verified against manual annotation provided by students and scholars (Lombardo et al, 2015a); proposed the use of Drammar to safeguard drama as a form of intangible cultural heritage, underlying the tangible media (Lombardo et al, 2017b). In 2018, the Drammar ontology resource was released with a conference paper (Lombardo et al, 2018), with a permanent URL address and the registration to the Linked Open Vocaularies (LOV) platform.…”

Collaborative Ontology Development and its Use for Video Annotation in Elderly Care Domain

“…In this ontology, a drama is regarded as a series of actions by characters. It was applied to annotate some movie works in [4]. Both these works focused on film analysis, not domain-specific topics.…”

“…Ontology is one of the tools to provide controlled vocabulary and structure of data. Several works explored applying ontology to data annotation [2]- [4]. Ontology also provides background knowledge that is typically not directly observable from the dataset, such as the subsumption relations of the objects.…”