Hamlet has the edge over Antigone, though – at least when it comes to network density. But can he hold his own against the Cherry Orchad's clustering coefficient? On July 1, 2025, a group of advanced-level English students from Arndt-Gymnasium Dahlem visited us to find out.

Drawing on the digital text corpus DraCor, which he founded and maintains and in which thousands of historical stage plays are recorded, Cluster member and Professor of Digital Humanities Frank Fischer showed our young guests what fresh insights can be gained at the nexus of programming, network analysis and literary studies.

As a special highlight, the students were invited to join the Battle of the Plays, a physical card game co-developed by Fischer in which world-famous and lesser-known dramas compete against each other in a variety of network-related categories. Two teachers and 26 students adopted a pseudonym of their own choosing and faced off in a tournament that quickly exposed the relative strengths and weaknesses of each play – as it turned out, Napoleon oder Die hundert Tage by Christian Dietrich Grabbe had an unbeatably large network size of 259, but didn't stand a chance against the impressive average path length of Strindberg's Miss Julie. In a nail-biting final, "Dienstag8" ultimately came out on top against "Gandalf the Grey".

A big thank you goes out to all students for their indomitable fighting spirit! We are also very grateful to their teachers, Maren Lee Schirmer and Almuth Meissner, as well as Sabine Greiner and her team at uni.vers for the excellent cooperation.