Bringing Authoritative Models to Computational Drama (Encoding Knebel’s Action Analysis)

Abstract

Abstract. 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 e cacy in a production point of view. As an example we use Knebel's analysis of Pogodin's Kremlin Chimes.

The ontology of drama

“…As anticipated in the Introduction, the development of Drammar has been carried out for a decade by a team of knowledge engineers, experts in Artificial Intelligence, and drama scholars, by interleaving use and design as a consequence of the insight gained through practical tasks. As a resource, Drammar was employed for various tasks, ranging from the visualization of drama structure for research and teaching Albert et al, 2016) to the calculation of characters' emotions (Lombardo et al, 2015b).…”

“…The feasibility of the annotation has been tested through the creation of a corpus of annotated dramatic media, spanning from movie scenes and marketing videos to video clips and scripts (see Lombardo et al (2017a) for details). Albert et al (2016) have exploited the annotation of a 19th Century dramatic work in Drammar (Nikolay Pogodin's "Kremlin Chimes") to prove the expressiveness of the ontology for the methodology of action analysis proposed by the drama theorist Maria Knebel (Carnicke, 2010) and to test its use from the perspective of the actors' interpretation. The status of the annotated works created by the scholarly and production activities mentioned above can be clarified by referring to the model known as Functional Representation of Bibliographic Records, or FRBR (O'Neill, 2011).…”

“…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.…”

Algorithms and Interoperability between Drama and Artificial Intelligence

“…Linked Data) to represent the domain-specific knowledge about the elements of drama. This ontology has been tested against a well-established model for analyzing drama (Albert et al 2016), and used for different tasks such as the preservation of drama as part of the intangible cultural heritage and the visualization of dramatic structure (Lombardo and Pizzo 2014). Drammar ontology also implements a model of descriptions of emotions and has been tested to verify the mode in which the dramatic characters' (called agents in the ontology) interaction may elicit emotions (Lombardo et al 2015).…”