Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS INFRA): a project to connect people, data, tools, and methods:

Abstract

The aim of this poster is to provide an overview of the principal objectives of the CLS INFRA project, its aims and structure as well as ways to get in touch.

Introduction
Just as much as the exact sciences, research in the social sciences and the humanities relies on research infrastructures: no research could be conducted without academic libraries, cultural heritage institutions, and academic and mass-market publishers. The digital turn, however, not only reshaped the theoretical and methodological frameworks in several disciplines, but it also redefined the notion of research infrastructures (see e.g. Borgman 2010, Moulin et al. 2011, Kitchin 2021). Nowadays, at least in Digital Humanities, it is hard to conduct any cutting-edge research without access to the relevant digital resources, tools to analyze them, networks of collaborating teams and individuals, and efficient communication channels to disseminate the results. In particular, this applies to computational literary studies (CLS).

An Infrastructure for CLS
With respect to the field of computational literary studies more specifically, the digital age offers challenges and opportunities for completing research on Europe’s multilingual and interconnected literary heritage. At present, the landscape of literary data is diverse and fragmented. Even though many resources are currently available in digital libraries, archives, repositories, websites or catalogues, a lack of standardisation hinders how they are constructed, accessed and the extent to which they are reusable (Ciotti 2014). The Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS INFRA) project aims to federate these resources, with the tools needed to interrogate them, and with a widened base of users, in the spirit of the FAIR and CARE principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016, Carroll 2020). The resulting improvements will benefit researchers by bridging gaps between greater- and lesser-resourced communities in computational literary studies and beyond, ultimately offering opportunities to create new research and insight into our shared and varied European cultural heritage. CLS INFRA’s efforts are central to catering to these urgent infrastructural needs of a growing user community.

Project website:
https://www.clsinfra.io.

Rather than building entirely new resources for literary studies, the project is strongly committed to exploiting and connecting the already-existing efforts and initiatives, in order to acknowledge and utilize the immense human labour that has already been undertaken. Therefore, the project builds on recently-compiled high-quality literary corpora, such as DraCor and ELTeC (Fischer et al. 2019, Burnard et al. 2021, Schöch et al. to appear), integrates existing tools for text analysis, e.g. TXM, stylo, multilingual NLP pipelines (Heiden 2010, Eder et al. 2016), and takes advantage of deep integration with two other infrastructural projects, namely the CLARIN and DARIAH ERICs.

See
https://www.dariah.eu and
https://www.clarin.eu.

Consequently, the project aims at building a coherent ecosystem to foster the technical and intellectual findability and accessibility of relevant data. The ecosystem consists of (1) resources, i.e. text collections for drama, poetry and prose in several languages, (2) tools, (3) methodological and theoretical considerations, (4) a network of CLS scholars based at different European institutions, (5) a system of short-term research stays for both early career researchers and seasoned scholars, (6) a repository for training materials, as well as (7) an efficient dissemination strategy. The structure of the project with its work packages closely follows the above components of the infrastructure.

The project is delivered by a geographically balanced, complementary transnational consortium of key local and national infrastructure providers, covering the full range of the project’s defined areas for integration and innovation and aligned so as to create a common infrastructural approach for computational literary studies. In particular the deep integration of both the CLARIN and DARIAH ERICs ensure the project’s long term stability and sustainability.

Conclusion
The key aim of our poster is to provide a wide range of stakeholders – researchers, librarians, infrastructure providers – with an understanding of our project and with contact points for specific issues as to motivate them to get involved.

Acknowledgements
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004984.

Beyond the authors of this poster proposal, we would like to acknowledge the role of the work package leads: Maciej Eder (coordinator), Justin Tonra, Christof Schöch, Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Carolin Odebrecht, Matej Ďurčo, Peer Trilcke, Frank Fischer, Julie M.
Birkholz, Marco Raciti. Find out more about the team here:

.

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