The Lope Project

This digital humanities research project began as part of Elisa Beshero Bondar's Coding and Digital Archives class in Fall 2016. We convert Lope de Vega texts available in the public domain to XML following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative. Our goal is to offer the public new ways to see the Lope texts. This project's central research questions focus on emotion and the body, but we offer reading views and visualizations of various aspects of the texts as a service to students and scholars. All of our work is licensed through Creative Commons and may be used for any non-commercial purpose as long as proper credit is given.

Research Question

This project investigates the correlation of the language of the body and emotion with gender, genre, character, medical vocabulary, geography, and other phenomena in the Lope de Vega corpus.

TEI Encoding

In order to quantify Lope's use of certain lexical items, we use TEI encoding to flag words and phrases of interest as well as the names of people and places. When we tag emotion, we also identify the part of speech of the word. The texts presented as reading views on the site were prepared as xml documents with TEI markup.

Close and Distant Reading

In the first phase of the project we have three coded texts addressed in isolation. In order to identify the language of body and emotion, we conducted close reading on all the texts. Our results suggest useful ways to read these individual texts, but in the long term, we plan to compare texts to each other. Ultimately we plan to use a combination of close and distant reading techniques to theorize Lope's use of our targeted semantic fields. The next phase of the project will compare five plays with female protagonists to five plays with male protagonists.


Project Team