Literature and algorithms
Drama Critiques explores 10 years of English contemporary theatre by using Data Science. By focusing on two literary communities (journalists on the one hand and bloggers on the other hand) we examine the poetical and political discourse they build thanks to their reviews. Based on a corpus of more than 40 000 theatre reviews published between 2010 and 2020 on the London stage, Drama Critiques explores the similaries and the differences between these two communities thanks to algorithms.
THE PROJECT
Since 2010 in England, a wave of blogs written by authors coming from various horizons has arisen on the Internet. Students, theatre professionals but also mere amateurs began publishing their own theatre reviews. These new independent voices in the digital space progressively redefined the shape of classic journalistic criticism. Although discreet, they offer a new vision of the history of Londonian theatres.
DATABASE
With more than 40 000 English theatre reviews, our corpus is composed of the 23 most influent newspapers (The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, etc.) and the 28 most popular blogs of the Internet (West End Wilma, Everything Theatre, There Ought To Be Clowns, etc.). It is thanks to this database that we can analyse both of these communities thanks to digital tools.
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