Drama annotation

Drama annotation is the process of annotating the metadata of a drama. 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 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.

Drama across media and genres

Drama encompasses different media and languages, ranging from Greek tragedy and musical drama to action movies and video games: 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, 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 and the modernist play Six Characters in Search of an Author. The exponential spread of drama in contemporary culture has led Martin Esslin 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 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.