Dr. Federico Pianzola is Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. Federico’s fellowship is closely connected to the recently funded ERC Starting Grant (Golem), in which in a graph database of fanfiction corpora taken from various online sources and in different languages will be developed. The goal is to describe texts using derivative data referring to various textual features, so that comparisons between texts can be done without accessing the full text of the stories.

Federico would like to use the DraCor infrastructure and tools as part of his project, especially the frontend visualization of the corpora and their linking to other open data. In drama, characters are a central element and that is also the case for fanfiction stories, because fandoms grow mainly in relation to the affective attachment that authors have for characters. In DraCor, characters are the focus in the structuring of texts, metadata, and the visualization tools. Therefore, DraCor tools are a great fit and can be easily adapted to the project’s needs.