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  • A Description of ARTELOPE:A Database Containing Information, Plots, and Texts Related to Lope De Vega's Theater
  • Joan Oleza (bio)

In the vein of developing and applying new technologies to the humanities, and of creating large research instruments, the ARTELOPE project designed a database with information and plot summaries taken from a fundamental corpus of the Spanish literary patrimony, the theater of Lope de Vega. This subject matter was extremely difficult to tackle as a whole due to its huge size. The project, funded by the Spanish Research and Development National Plan since 2001 and directed by Professor Joan Oleza at the University of Valencia, Spain, is currently supported by twenty-five researchers from different countries and universities who are a part of international Hispanism.

After more than ten years of work on this database, in 2011 ARTELOPE. Base de datos y argumentos del teatro de Lope de Vega (http://artelope.uv.es) was published online in an open-access format, comprising a total of 405 entries on plays by Lope de Vega that are certainly his or probably his, and even some that have been falsely attributed to him but that present a special interest. Each entry is structured in three major sections with a total of nineteen data sections. These entries include a section on Bibliographical data concerning the theatrical text: titles by which the play is known; if the title appears in the list of his plays that Lope included in the prologue of his novel El peregrino en su patria; early modern editions; manuscripts; modern editions; a section on Pragmatic data that includes the date of the play, its dedication, number of verses; and a section on the Characteristics of the plot (list and type of characters, both the individual ones and those that appear as collective ones; social universes that participate in the plot; dramatic genre it belongs to, according to [End Page 150] a classification based on Lope's dramaturgy; historical period in which the plot takes place; locations and spaces present in the play; duration of the plot; and observations). This last section ends with a summary of each act.

A powerful search engine offers users the option to combine all the data included in the entries, therefore allowing for complex and sophisticated searches. After the publication of ARTELOPE, the research group has continued to work on it, reviewing its content, improving the search engine, and adding new entries (whose number is currently 411).

This first phase of the project, completed but continuously revised, is continued in ARTELOPE II, an expansion and diversification of ARTELOPE. We use a FileMaker database and the different researchers have personalized privileges for remote access. This new database adds new content to the original field of "Bibliographical data" (we are creating a complete catalog of the different editions of each play and a bibliography of critical studies on each of the plays) and incorporates digital editions of the plays (which are marked up in XML [extensible markup language]/TEI [text encoding initiative]). Currently we have a total of ninety-eight texts published online and as EPUB. We have added a "Digital library" to the website (http://www.artelope.uv.es/biblioteca), which has begun to include these digital editions of plays by Lope.

Finally, in the year 2010 the project ARTELOPE, together with another eleven prestigious research groups focused on early modern Spanish theater, became part of the larger project Classical Spanish Theatrical Patrimony TC/12.1 This macro-project is currently formed by 150 researchers from fifty-two universities and research centers and is coordinated by Professor Oleza. This project is part of the research program "Consolider Ingenio 2010," which includes the cutting-edge projects of the Spanish National Research and Development Program.

Joan Oleza

Joan Oleza is Professor at the University of Valencia in the Spanish Philology department. He has served as head of the department and dean of the Philology faculty. At present, he is the Principal Investigator of the macro-project Spanish Classical Theatrical Patrimony: Texts and Research Instruments (TC/12-Consolider), which involves forty-nine universities and 154 researchers. He is also the Principal Investigator of the multidisciplinary (Social Sciences and Humanities...

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