# Annotated Short Mystery Novels Data Set

This data set consists of ten annotated short mystery novels
(whodunits). The novels, written in English between 1891 and 1924,
range from 2,000 to 10,000 words each. This length ensures they are
long enough to capture the full narrative structure of whodunits while
remaining feasible for manual annotation. Unlike data sets like those
developed in the SANTA project, which annotated shorter texts (under
2,000 words) for narrative levels and scene segmentation (Reiter,
2019), this data set contains annotated full texts to uncover complete
narrative structures.

The narratives (listed below) were sourced from Project Gutenberg
(https://www.gutenberg.org) with the original URLs provided in the
second table. Plain text (UTF-8) versions of the novels were
downloaded, and metadata such as colophons, titles, tables of
contents, and forewords were manually removed, retaining chapter
headings and section breaks for narrative analysis.

|  # | Title                                       | Author                    |
|---:|:--------------------------------------------|:--------------------------|
|  1 | A case of identity                          | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle    |
|  2 | A question of passports                     | Emmuska Orczy             |
|  3 | A scandal in bohemia                        | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle    |
|  4 | Story of the young man in holy orders       | Robert Louis Stevenson    |
|  5 | The adventures of the Italian nobleman      | Agatha Christie           |
|  6 | The chronicles of Addington Peace           | Bertram Fletcher Robinson |
|  7 | The jewel robbery at the grand metropolitan | Agatha Christie           |
|  8 | The mystery of Hunter's Lodge               | Agatha Christie           |
|  9 | The mystery of the steel disk               | Broughton Brandenburg     |
| 10 | The red-headed league                       | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle    |


|  # | Original URL                                           |
|---:|:-------------------------------------------------------|
|  1 | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/48320/pg48320.txt |
|  2 | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5805/pg5805.txt   |
|  3 | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/48320/pg48320.txt |
|  4 | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/74548/pg74548.txt |
|  5 | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61262/pg61262.txt |
|  6 | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/74548/pg74548.txt |
|  7 | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61262/pg61262.txt |
|  8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61262/pg61262.txt |
|  9 | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/74548/pg74548.txt |
| 10 | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/48320/pg48320.txt |

Next, the texts were manually annotated with a detailed annotation
scheme (Heyns, 2024) that tags narrative elements including scene
boundaries, diegetic levels (extradiegetic, intradiegetic,
metadiegetic), acts, focalization, and voice, as well as
genre-specific features such as detective thoughts, confessions, and
reveals. The information is annotated using 17 unique tags. The
narratives have a total of 357 tags assigned across the ten novels.

The annotation process was done using CATMA (https://catma.de/,
version 7). The annotated texts are exported in TEI XML format and
converted to a CSV format using the teitocsv package
(https://github.com/komax/teitocsv).

The data is valuable for computational narratology studies, including
narrative segmentation, plot structure analysis, and genre
classification, as well as for literary studies exploring narrative
techniques in mystery novels. It supports intra-genre analysis of
whodunit structures and cross-genre comparisons with other narrative
forms, such as modernist novels (Kearns, 2020). Potential applications
include refining algorithms for narrative generation and summarization
(Droog-Hayes, 2018) and serving as a teaching resource for narrative
analysis.


## Directories

- `original`: Contains the original plain text (UTF-8) files
  containing the ten mystery novels as downloaded from Project
  Gutenberg.
- `txt`: Contains the plain text (UTF-8) files of the ten mystery
  novels, with metadata (e.g., colophons, titles, tables of contents,
  forewords) manually removed.
- `xml`: Contains the annotated versions of the novels in TEI XML
  format, generated using CATMA.
- `csv`: Contains CSV versions of the files in the xml directory.


## Data Collection Size

- Number of novels: 10
- Number of unique tags: 17
- Number of tags in the novels: 357
- Number of sentences: 4648
- Number of words: 61,528

Note: the number of sentences and words are computed using the text
analyzer at https://www.online-utility.org/text/analyzer.jsp.


## Annotation Process

The novels were manually annotated by Nuette Heyns using CATMA,
following the annotation guidelines described in Heyns (2024). The
annotation scheme includes narrative elements (scene boundaries,
diegetic levels, acts, focalization, voice) and genre-specific tags
(e.g., detective thoughts, confessions, reveals). No automated scripts
were used for annotation, ensuring high-quality manual tagging. Users
can access the plain text files (in the `txt` directory) and
corresponding annotations (in the `xml` or `csv` directories) for
analysis.


## Authors

Nuette Heyns  
Faculty of Humanities  
North-West University  
Internal Box 340, Private Bag X6001  
Potchefstroom 2520  
South Africa  
nuette.heyns@gmail.com

Menno van Zaanen  
South African Centre for Digital Language Resources  
Internal Box 340, Private Bag X6001  
Potchefstroom 2520  
South Africa  
menno.vanzaanen@nwu.ac.za


## Keywords

Mystery novels, Narrative, Narrative levels, Scene annotations


## License

This data collection is made available under the following license:

Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International CC
BY-SA 4.0


## Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

Heyns, N., & van Zaanen, M. (2025). Mystery Narratives Dataset. South
African Centre for Digital Language Resources.
https://hdl.handle.net/@@@/@@


## References

Heyns, N., & Van Zaanen, M. (2024, November). Annotating mystery
novels: Guidelines and adaptations. In Y. K. Lal et al. (Eds.),
Proceedings of the the 6th workshop on narrative understanding (pp.
55-66). Miami, Florida, USA: Association for Computational
Linguistics. Retrieved from https://aclanthology.org/2024.wnu-1.9/
DOI: 10.18653/v1/2024.wnu-1.9

Reiter, N. (2019). The Systematic Analysis of Narrative Texts through
Annotation (SANTA): A Shared Task. Proceedings of the Digital
Humanities Conference, 1-10, Utrecht, Netherlands.

Kearns, M. (2020). Annotating Time in Fiction: A Case Study of
Modernist and Hypertext Narratives. Digital Scholarship in the
Humanities, 35(3), 567-582.

Droog-Hayes, M. (2018). Applying Propp's Morphology to Narrative
Summarization. Computational Linguistics, 44(4), 721-745.
