OcOr : a Corpus of Occitan Oral Narratives

OcOr is a corpus of Occitan oral narratives. This corpus is one of the outputs of the project ExpressioNarration, financed by a Marie Sklodovska Curie Fellowship (2016-2018, n°655034).

It includes three sub-corpora, constituted as follows:

• OOT (Occitan, oral, traditional): stories drawn from fieldwork among native speakers in the Occitan domain, recorded by the COMDT (Conservatoire Occitan des Musiques et Danses Traditionnelles - http://www.comdt.org/), transcribed and digitised for the project by the researchers.

• OWT (Occitan, written, traditional): published literary stories, digitised by and for the project by the researchers. These are stories collected from oral sources and produced in a publishable written version.

• OOC (Occitan, oral, contemporary): stories recounted by contemporary artists, taken from existing recordings and two Toulouse storytelling events organised by the project in collaboration with the Institut d'Etudes Occitanes (IEO), in 2016. The stories were recorded during the events and subsequently transcribed and digitised by the researchers.

The overall aim of the ExpressioNarration project was to use contemporary linguistic theory to explore the relationship between language and orality, with a specific focus on key temporal features of oral narrative in Occitan, including ‘tenses’, ‘connectives' and 'frame introducers'. These features were thus annotated in the three sub-corpora.

All the sub-corpora are disseminated in XML format (TEI-P5) and PDF. Each story is available as an annotated XML document, an annotated PDF and a stripped PDF document.

Full metadata appears in the Header of each XML document, with information on speakers (e.g. gender, age, place of origin, education, languages spoken), variety of Occitan (or dialect), authors/editorial information (in the case of OWT) and story-type when relevant (i.e. the Aarne Thompson category).  For each sub-corpus, a user-friendly summary of this metadata is also available in an Excel spreadsheet: these are contained in the OcOr zipfile.  

The annotation system was designed by the researchers and is given in full in the Header of each XML document.  

For further information on the constitution of the corpus and discussion of the theoretical and methodological issues relating to data collection, digitisation and annotation, please read the following article in the journal Corpus, written by the researchers and entitled ‘Méthodologie pour la constitution d’un corpus comparatif de narration orale en Occitan : objectifs, défis, solutions’, available at: https://journals.openedition.org/corpus/3490.