Dr Sarah Hoover is a dramaturg, lecturer and researcher focusing on interactive performances. Hoover is a postdoctoral researcher with the EU-Horizon project Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS INFRA). She has recently published her monograph Reflective affective dramaturgies of participatory theatre: larping audiences into performance (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) and a co-written chapter ‘Performance Studies and Role-Playing Games’ for Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations, edited by José Pablo Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, Routledge (forthcoming 2025). Her research explores production development that encourages agentive and reflective contribution by audiences as well as by collaborative performance-makers. Hoover’s recent dramaturgical production credits include Yaqui & Béal: Yoeme and Irish in Conversation by Esther Almazán, directed by Raphaël Adams (O’Donoghue Theatre, Galway, 5-6 May) and Post Office at the Hawthorn by Jenni Nikinmaa (Sound performance in Galway Theatre Festival, 3-11 May).

This paper presents an initial exploration of leveraging resources from the CLS INFRA project to conceptualize a research initiative focused on the unique potential of dramaturgy in Ireland. With its interdisciplinary and international scope, CLS INFRA provides a robust framework for digital humanities projects, offering tools, best practices, and datasets that support the development of innovative and inclusive methodologies.  

Dramaturgy in Ireland, deeply interwoven with the country’s cultural and social fabric, remains underexplored in computational and digital humanities and underutilized for fostering equitable production practice. As Nahed Meklash says of the digitization of the Abbey Archives: “[a] diversity of sources makes digital preservation policies and practices more progressive and refined.” This project imagines using CLS INFRA outputs such as the Skills Matrix Survey (van Rossum and Šeļa, 2022), Toolkit for Data Sharing (Mrugalski, Odebrecht, and Gouzi), DraCor: The Drama Corpora Project (Fischer et al., 2019), and the Survey of Methods (Schoch, Dudar, and Fileva, 2023) as foundational resources.  

Central to this exploration is the creation of an opportunistic “living corpus,” inspired by CLS INFRA principles for dynamic data reuse (Odebrecht, 2024). Featuring annotated interviews with Irish dramaturgs, the corpus would allow iterative updates and the integration of new insights over time. Annotations, including thematic tagging, script references, and metadata on dramaturgical methods, would create a continually evolving resource while responding to needs such as disrupting colonial structures and public accessibility. As Burnard, Schoch, and Odebrecht insist of ELTeC: “[Its composition is] defensible, at least in theory, as a principled and representative selection” (NP).  

This paper walks through potential research design to demonstrate how CLS INFRA’s outputs cross disciplines to foster an inclusive approach to research design that balances theatre studies' unique demands with digital tools' transformative potential.  

* CLS INFRA: Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004984.  

Works Cited:  

Burnard, Lou, Christof Schöch, and Carolin Odebrecht. 2021. “In Search of Comity: TEI for Distant Reading.” Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, no. Issue 14 (March). https://doi.org/10.4000/jtei.3500.

Fischer, Frank, Ingo Börner, Mathias Göbel, Angelika Hechtl, Christopher Kittel, Carsten Milling, and Peer Trilcke. 2019. “Programmable Corpora: Introducing DraCor, an Infrastructure for the Research on European Drama,”July. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.4284002.

Meklash, Nahed Mohammed Ahmed. “Global Ireland and the Digital Footprint: The Abbey Theatre Archives in the Digital Repository of Ireland.” Studi Irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies 13 (July 31, 2023). https://doi.org/10.36253/SIJIS-2239-3978-14641.

Mrugalski, Michał, Carolin Odebrecht and Françoise Gouzi. 2024. D5.3: Recommendations for Data Sharing between Researchers and Institutions in the Field of Literary Studies. https://data.clsinfra.io

Schöch, Christof, Dudar, Julia, and Fileva, Evgeniia. “CLS INFRA D3.2: Series of Five Short Survey Papers on Methodological Issues.” Zenodo, March 31, 2023. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.7782363.

Van Rossum, Lisanne M., and Artjoms Šeļa. “CLS INFRA D4.1 Skills Gap Analysis,” February 28, 2022. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.6401857.

Wilkinson, Mark D., Michel Dumontier, IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Gabrielle Appleton, Myles Axton, Arie Baak, Niklas Blomberg, et al. 2016. “The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship.” Scientific Data 3 (1): 160018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18.