The Argentine Drama Corpus (ArDraCor) project is an initiative to create a digitally encoded corpus of nineteenth-century Argentine dramatic texts. As part of the broader Drama Corpora (DraCor) project and its concept of “programmable corpora”—which treats corpora as interconnected, functional objects within the wider digital ecosystem—ArDraCor seeks to expand the platform’s geographical and cultural scope by offering the first dedicated Latin American subcorpus.

ArDraCor serves both general and specialized research purposes. At a programmatic level, it provides essential digital infrastructure for computational literary studies of Argentine drama, a field currently constrained by the lack of large, structured corpora. More specifically, the corpus supports two primary research directions: (1) the study of dramatic subgenres, particularly short and one-act plays, including genres of musical theatre, and rooted in Hispanic and Argentine traditions, and (2) the identification and analysis of recurring character types, whether fictional stock figures or historical personae.

In terms of cultural and geographic focus, ArDraCor includes works by Argentine authors and plays first published or premiered in Argentina. Temporally, it spans a broadly defined “long nineteenth century,” from 1780 to 1920. The 1920 cut-off reflects a practical boundary: after this period, dramatic production becomes far more numerous and diverse, requiring a separate methodological approach. All plays included in the corpus are in Spanish and were originally written in that language.

In its initial phase, nearly 200 potential texts have been identified in digitized image, full text or HTML formats. By September 2025, eight texts have been encoded in XML-TEI and are currently hosted on the DraCor staging server. The texts are edited in accordance with the DraCor guidelines and made publicly available via a dedicated GitHub repository. This encoding strategy facilitates a rich representation of the sources, incorporating metadata such as title, date, author, genre, bibliographic sources, character lists, and performance notes as well as structural mark-up of the texts themselves (acts, scenes, speeches, verse lines, paragraphs of prose, stage directions, ...), while enabling seamless integration with existing DraCor functionalities and external data sources.

Complementing the corpus, project members have also developed TeatrAr, an online database derived from the ongoing work on the collection of metadata about the plays, which compiles detailed information on relevant works. Entries in TeatrAr provide data on composition date, the theater and city of a play’s premiere, and supplementary commentary. Although the availability of information varies across texts, TeatrAr represents a valuable resource for ongoing research in the field.