St. Petersburg Corpus of Hagiographic Texts (SCAT): Mark–Up and Analysis of Content Elements

The St. Petersburg Corpus of Hagiographic Texts (SCAT), maintained by the Department of Mathematical Linguistics of St. Petersburg State University, contains 22 lives of Northern Russian saints of 15 th –17 th centuries. XML mark–up is being introduced in the text allowing, in particular, to analyze their structure elements. Eight texts are provided with content structure markup, reflecting the division of texts into chapters and smaller elements. Since almost all texts in the corpus describe lives of monastery founders, it was possible to discover the principles of plot development common for the texts of this kind. Yet two of the marked–up texts are different from the other six, as they tell lives of wonderworkers, i. e. describe a different type of endeavor. Comparing the texts of two types allows us not only to analyze differences but also to find common content structure elements typical for all the texts.