Building a Representative Theater Corpus

The Digital Parisian Stage Project aims to compile a corpus of plays that are representative of performances in the theaters of Paris through history. This book surveys existing corpora that cover the nineteenth century, lays out the issue of corpus representativeness in detail, and, using a random sample of plays from this period, presents two case studies of language in use in the Napoleonic era. It presents a compelling argument for the compilation and use of representative corpora in linguistic study, and will be of interest to those working in the fields of corpus linguistics, digital humanities, and history of the theater.