Drama annotation is the process of annotating the
metadata
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
of a
drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been ...
. Given a drama expressed in some medium (text, video, audio, etc.), the process of metadata annotation identifies what are the elements that characterize the drama and annotates such elements in some metadata format. For example, in the sentence "Laertes and Polonius warn Ophelia to stay away from Hamlet." from the text ''
Hamlet
''The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark'', often shortened to ''Hamlet'' (), is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play, with 29,551 words. Set in Denmark, the play depicts ...
'', the word "Laertes", which refers to a drama element, namely a character, will be annotated as "Char", taken from some set of metadata. This article addresses the drama annotation projects, with the sets of metadata and annotations proposed in the scientific literature, based markup languages and
ontologies
In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains ...
.
Drama across media and genres
Drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been ...
encompasses different media and languages, ranging from
Greek tragedy
Greek tragedy is a form of theatre from Ancient Greece and Greek inhabited Anatolia. It reached its most significant form in Athens in the 5th century BC, the works of which are sometimes called Attic tragedy.
Greek tragedy is widely believed t ...
and musical drama to
action movies and
video games
Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device to gener ...
: despite their huge differences, these examples share traits of the cultural construct that we recognise as drama. drama can be considered as a form of
intangible cultural heritage
An intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is a practice, representation, expression, knowledge, or skill considered by UNESCO to be part of a place's cultural heritage. Buildings, historic places, monuments, and artifacts are cultural property. Int ...
, since it is characterised by an evolving nature, with form and function that change in time: for example, consider the difference between the Greek Tragedy
Oedipus
Oedipus (, ; grc-gre, Οἰδίπους "swollen foot") was a mythical Greek king of Thebes. A tragic hero in Greek mythology, Oedipus accidentally fulfilled a prophecy that he would end up killing his father and marrying his mother, thereby ...
and the modernist play
Six Characters in Search of an Author
''Six Characters in Search of an Author'' ( it, Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore, link=no ) is an Italian play by Luigi Pirandello, written and first performed in 1921. An absurdist fiction, absurdist metatheatrical, metatheatric play about th ...
. The exponential spread of drama in contemporary culture has led
Martin Esslin
, birth_date =
, birth_place = Budapest, Austria-Hungary
, death_date =
, death_place = London, England, UK
, education = University of ViennaMax Reinhardt Seminar, ...
to forge the definition of “dramatic media", i.e. media that display characters performing live actions, such as theatre, cinema and videogames.
The discrete manifestations of drama are documented in different media, including text, score, video, audio, etc. The dramatic content underlying these manifestation, however, does not depend on the specific medium: take, for example, the Arden edition of the written drama of
Hamlet
''The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark'', often shortened to ''Hamlet'' (), is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play, with 29,551 words. Set in Denmark, the play depicts ...
and
Laurence Olivier's movie Hamlet, two examples of the drama heritage which share the same drama content despite the differences of the media support. The annotation of the content of media that convey dramatic content requires the use of an annotation schema expressed in a formal language, which makes the annotation comparable, and, possibly,
machine readable.
The first attempts at attaching content metadata to media concerned text documents and were carried out by using
markup languages
Markup language refers to a text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship between its parts. Markup is often used to control the display of the document ...
, such as
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...
, which allow to embed content tags into the document text. With the advent of the
Semantic Web project, descriptive tools have evolved towards the use of ontologies, thanks to the languages and resources provided by the Semantic Web project. In particular, semantic annotation relies on the use of the
Resource Description Framework The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of ...
language, specifically designed to described Web content of any type.
The semantic annotation of drama consists of representing the knowledge about drama in a machine-readable format to serve the task of annotating the dramatic content coherently across different media and languages, abstracting at the same time from the technicalities of signals and text encoding. The annotation of dramatic content across media and
genres
Genre () is any form or type of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other for ...
is a way to preserve, compare and study the nature of drama and of its manifestations. Moreover, the availability of content metadata about drama is a precondition for a range of generative tasks that range from automatising the generation of drama to supporting human creativity in this task.
Story and Drama Annotation through markup languages and linguistic schemata
Story annotation consists of annotating the content of
narratives
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.) or fictional (fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc.). Narra ...
. In most cases, this effort is undertaken with the goal of constructing corpora of annotated narratives, or story corpora, finalised at the study of the relationship between the linguistic expression of the story in the narrative and its content.
In the last decade, to a number of research initiatives especially oriented to the description of story and characters. For example, consider the Narrative Knowledge Representation Language (NKRL) and the DramaBank project, specifically oriented to the representation of story content in natural language texts.
The annotation of narrative texts has been prompted and influenced by two main lines of research. On the one side, the tradition of knowledge representation in AI has contributed the conceptual tools for describing the content of stories, with languages that span from scripts
chank 1975to
frames.
The linguistic counterpart of this line of research has resulted in resources situated at the lexical-semantic level (such as
FrameNet
FrameNet is a research and resource development project based at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, California, which has produced an electronic resource based on a theory of meaning called
frame semantics. The data ...
and at the interface between syntax and semantics (such as
PropBank
PropBank is a corpus that is annotated with verbal propositions and their arguments—a "proposition bank". Although "PropBank" refers to a specific corpus produced by Martha Palmer ''et al.'', the term ''propbank'' is also coming to be used a ...
, which offer tools for representing the connection between the expression of the narrative through the text and the narrative content itself). For example, the Story Workbench tool encompasses a layered annotation scheme, which uses these resources for the multi-layer annotation of narratives.
On the other side, the annotation of narratives has benefited from the trend, established during the last three decades, of representing the content of documents in a machine-readable form. With the advent of markup languages such as
Text Encoding Initiative
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities, operating continuously since the 1980s. The community currently runs a mailing list, meetings and conference series, and main ...
(TEI) for encoding text in digital form and annotating their structure, the use of markup has soon become the standard in text annotation projects.
In particular, projects such as Narrative Knowledge Representation Language (NKRL) leveraged the use of markup languages for the representation of the narrative content of text, revamping the use of frames into the emerging scenario of media indexing and retrieval. More recently, as part of the more general effort of constructing resources for the automation of language processing and generation, Elson has proposed a template based language for describing the narrative content of text documents, with the goal of creating a corpus of annotated narrative texts, called DramaBank project. In recent years, the annotation of narrative text has evolved towards minimal schemata targeted at grasping the regularities of written and oral narratives at the discourse level. These initiatives, however, rooted in narrative theories, tend to focus on the realization of narratives though a specific medium, i.e., text, leaving behind the universal elements of dramatic narration that go behind the expressive characteristics of each medium.
Story and drama annotation through computational ontologies
Mostly oriented to the indexing and retrieval of media, ontologies and vocabularies have appeared that support the representation of the content of media according to a shared semantics, available across the Web. In particular, semantic resources such as VERL (the Video Event Representation Language and LODE (Linked Open Description of Events) provide structured description of events that can be applied to the description of incidents in stories. In the paradigm of
Linked Data
In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but r ...
, these resources become the infrastructure for content-based applications in the field of media: for example, consider the project EventMedia, where different vocabularies have been aligned with automatic methods to create an illustrated catalog of media representing events.
A media-independent model of story is provided by the OntoMedia ontology, exploited across different projects (such as the Contextus Project to annotate the narrative content of different media objects, ranging from written literature to comics and TV fiction. This project encompasses some concepts, such the notion of character, that are relevant for the description of drama, but, being mainly focused on the representation of events and the order in which they are exposed in media for cross-media comparison, it lacks the capability of representing the core notions of drama. In the field of cultural heritage dissemination, the StorySpace ontology, an ontology of story, supports museum curators in linking the content of artworks through stories, with the ultimate goal of enabling the generation of user tailored content retrieval.
A line of research has tackled the use of logical representations to describe stories, with the goal of creating generative systems that leverage the
axiomatization of narrative structures. Finally, some scholars have created representational tools for specific narrative theories, ranging from literary structuralism to scriptwriting practices
References
{{reflist
External links
Story Workbench toolContextus ProjectDrammar project wiki
Metadata