Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure

ended

The CLS INFRA project brings together and further develops institutional, national and regional efforts to build shared and sustainable infrastructure - high-quality data, tools and knowledge needed to undertake literary studies in the digital age. The resulting improvement in provision will benefit researchers by bridging gaps between greater- and lesser-resourced communities in computational literary studies and beyond. It is a particularly opportune moment for this activity, as projects across the literary genres have defined the requirements for such and infrastructure and organised the user community to be ready to use it. The landscape of literary data is currently very heterogenous, with the long and varied tradition of digital libraries meaning that while many resources are available, they are far from standardised in terms of how they are constructed, accessed and the extent to which they are reusable. CLS INFRA deploys strategies to align these diverse resources with each other, with the tools needed to interrogate them, and with a widened base of users able to create knowledge with and from them. It builds interoperability that integrates common and less common standardisation approaches, workflows to help researchers create, access, share, link, analyse, and interpret heterogenous data across languages and sources; and tools for accessing, harmonising and analysing data, all within a robust suite of stable technical approaches and standards. The project is delivered by a geographically balanced, complementary transnational consortium of key local and national infrastructure providers, covering the full range of the projects defined areas for integration and innovation and aligned so as to create a common infrastructural approach for computational literary studies in a maximally efficient and effective manner. In particular the deep integration of both the CLARIN and DARIAH ERICs ensure the project’s long term stability and sustainability.