Annotating Musical Theatre Plots on Narrative Structure and Emotional Content

Abstract

Although theoretical models of the structure of narrative arising from systematic analysis of corpora are available for domains such as Russian folk tales, there are no such sources for the plot lines of musical theatre. The present paper reports an effort of knowledge elicitation for features that characterise the narrative structure of plot in the particular domain of musical theatre. The following aspects are covered: identification of a valid vocabulary of abstract units to use in annotating musical theatre plots, development of a procedure for annotation - including a spread-sheet format for annotators to use, and a corresponding set of instructions to guide them through the process - selection of a corpus of musical theatre pieces that would constitute the corpus to be annotated, the annotation process itself and the results of post-processing the annotated corpus in search for insights on the narrative structure of musical theatre plots.