Project outputs
Table of contents
Deliverables
TNA Fellowships
Miscellaneous
D3.3 Showcases for the Application of CLS Methods and Tools
Are you an academic or non-academic literary researcher, linguist, or educator interested in how digital tools and methods can expand your knowledge? A scholar in the Digital Humanities field interested in CLS tools and methods?
The four showcases brought together in this deliverable illustrate, in a concrete, visual and interactive way, how some of the key methods in CLS work when they are applied to collections of literary texts. They are demonstrations, with a relatively low threshold for access, of how tools and datasets as elements of an integrated infrastructure such as the one developed in CLS INFRA, can be used in research.
Multilingual Stylometry Showcase
- Designed for: scholars and students, linguists
- Topics: the intersection of language, corpus composition, and stylometric methods of authorship attribution.
- Dataset: a curated dataset from the ELTeC corpus, including texts in English, French, Hungarian, and Ukrainian, each translated to facilitate comparative analysis across languages.
By presenting stylometric analysis through interactive heatmaps, our tool invites users to engage directly with the data, exploring how linguistic features and corpus characteristics influence the identification of authorial style.
Detecting Small Worlds in a Corpus of Thousands of Theater Plays
- Designed for: scholars and students with basic knowledge of network theory
- Topics: typology of theatre plays from a network perspective
- Dataset: VeBiDraCor – the “very big drama corpus” created by aggregating all individual corpora available on DraCor 9 Aug 2022.
Averell: A corpus management tool to transform poetic corpora into a JSON format compliant with the POSTDATA ontology (Poetrylab Suite, part 1)
- Designed for: scholars and students interested in poetry
- Function: to help scholars create their own corpora of poetry by merging different corpora together
Averell is a tool that tries to lower the barrier for researchers interested in the study of multilingual poetry corpora. It provides a unified interface to query, manage, download, and merge corpora of poetic nature in multiple languages based on features relevant for poetry scansion and meter analysis.
Poetrylab + rantanplan: Using rantanplan for accurate scansion analysis and visualization (Poetrylab Suite, part 2)
- Designed for: scholars, researchers in linguistics, literature, and culture, poetry enthusiasts
- Topics: Spanish poetic forms
- Function: explore the nuances of meter, rhyme, and structure within various literary traditions of Spanish poetry
Poetrylab presents a suite of tools for the analysis and visualization of Spanish poetry. This comprehensive platform is designed to cater to a diverse audience, including scholars, researchers, students, and poetry enthusiasts. At the heart of Poetrylab lies rantanplan, a specialized Python library meticulously crafted for the scansion of Spanish poems. Leveraging advanced computational linguistics algorithms, rantanplan facilitates the identification and categorization of syllabic patterns, meter, and rhythmic structures within Spanish poetic compositions. Users can engage with Poetrylab’s user-friendly interface to conduct detailed scansion analyses, gaining valuable insights into the metrical intricacies and poetic nuances of Spanish verse. Whether exploring established literary traditions, studying poetic techniques, or seeking inspiration for creative endeavors, Poetrylab serves as an invaluable resource, fostering deeper understanding and appreciation of Spanish poetry among its users.
CLS INFRA TNA Fellow Jana Mende
In this video, CLS INFRA TNA Fellow Jana Mende (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) speaks about the project: ‘Monolingualism Deconstructed: Modelling Hidden and Invisible Multilingualism in German literature (1790-1890)’
CLS INFRA TNA Fellow Haimo Stiemer
Seminar: The Clash of the Modernists
For a long time, literary journals played only a minor role in book-centred philologies. Since their mass digitisation in the early 2000s, however, this has changed. Using the example of two German-language journals from the first half of the 20th century, this talk will demonstrate the heuristic potential of computational philology working with literary journals. As field artefacts, not only the content but also the form of the journals will be considered. According to Pierre Bourdieu, the form finally has its own message with which the actors position themselves in the world of literature and fight against each other.
Haimo Stiemer was a CLS Infrastructure Fellow at the Moore Institute, University of Galway, and works as a research associate at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Beside Computational Literary Studies, his areas of research include the literature of German-language modernism, Literary Sociology and Theory.
CLS INFRA TNA Fellow Ewa Data-Bukowska
In this video interview, Round 5 CLS INFRA TNA Fellow Ewa Data-Bukowska (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland) speaks about the project: ‘Language use in the paradigm of sustainability: Swedish translations of the works of Witold Gombrowicz’.
CLS INFRA TNA Fellow Eduardo Fernández
In this video interview, Round 4 CLS INFRA TNA Fellow Eduardo Fernández (European University Institute, Italy) speaks about the project: ‘Distant reading of early modern prophecies across Europe: corpus formation and testing’.
Cls Infra TNA Fellow Maciej Maryl
This seminar by Maciej Maryl was produced at the Moore Institute, University of Galway, 13 Dec 2023. It includes a presentation and discussion around the recent ALLEA report Recognising Digital Scholarly Outputs in the Humanities, which underscores the transformative impact of digital practices on humanities scholarship. It addresses challenges in digital humanities, focusing on transparency in linking resources to publications, recognising updates as scholarly contributions, reevaluating authorship, fostering digital skills, and adjusting evaluation methods. It also provides recommendations on the assessment of digital outputs like editions, databases, infographics, code, blogs, and podcasts. Each case study includes practical examples and suggested readings.
In this video, CLS INFRA TNA Fellow Assistant Professor Maciej Maryl speaks about the project: ‘Social Network Analysis of Career Trajectories in Polish Literature after 1989’
CLS INFRA TNA Fellow Richard Změlík
In this video interview, Round 3 TNA Fellow Richard Změlík discusses the project “Building a Literary Corpus of 19th Century Czech Prose’
D6.3 Standards beyond TEI / Extended Transformation Matrix / Alternative Formats
This deliverable builds on and further extends the findings of D6.1 “Inventory of existing data sources and formats” surveying the landscape of literary corpora, as well as D8.1 “Tools for NLP” cataloguing the set of tools in the context of CLS. Focusing on the wealth of formats used when encoding and processing text, it offers a comprehensive overview of common formats for encoding textual data, beyond the “lingua franca”, TEI, both in the domain of computational literary studies and computational linguistics, highlighting potential discrepancies in the approach between these two areas of research. The overview reveals a very heterogeneous landscape with a plethora of formats, devised for differing tasks, from philological encoding of historical text material, to computational annotation and processing of text.
Considering interoperability an indispensable key to reusability, the deliverable explores the challenges and approaches converting between formats.
CLS Beyond academic research: Interviews for Task 3.5
Dr Jennifer Edmond (Trinity College Dublin and DARIAH-EU) and Vera Yakupova (CLS INFRA and Trinity College Dublin) discuss the result of their interviews with non-academics on current and potential uses of Computational Literary Studies tools in the fields of:
- Policy
- Consultancy
- Journalism
- Medicine/ Psychology
- Publishing
- Arts
More will arise from this task – watch this space! If you are working in these fields and would like more information, contact us.
D5.2 Case Studies in Data Preparation and Sharing
Building on previous CLS INFRA deliverables, this report provides step-by-step case studies of research questions involving digitisation and transformation processes of literary corpora. The case studies:
- Creation of an ELTeC affine corpus of the Slovak novel (chapter 2)
- Finding the haiku across multilingual corpora (chapter 3)
- Measuring entropy and surprisal in the prose of the Tsarist Empire Devoted to Terrorism (Russian and Polish Texts) (chapter 4)
These case studies uniquely address not only the tools and resources available to CLS researchers but the complexities of collaborative decision-making regarding research methodologies.
D8.1: Tools for Basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) Tasks
In this video, Prof. Dr. Julie Birkholz and Mgr. Dr. Silvie Cinková discuss D8.1. This report lists and describes a selection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools which are considered to form a Corpus-Enrichment and NLP toolchain for common CLS research tasks. The tools were selected to be:
- safely positioned in their life cycle, i.e., state-of-the art, and mature as well as continuously maintained, or in development and promised as CLS Infra Deliverables by March 2025
- as multilingual as possible (beyond English and several major European languages)
- as interoperable as possible with other tools and texts in other languages.
D3.2: Survey of Methods
This survey documents current, widespread practices in research areas or issues that are prominent within CLS. Though it is not intended as a primer, the Survey Grid provides useful, targeted information in a format suitable for gaining a broad understanding of methods and issues. Fields include authorship attribution, genre analysis, literary history, gender analysis, and canonicity.
Click here to use the Survey Grid and review the deliverable.
CLS INFRA TNA FELLOW Khanim Garayeva
In this video CLS INFRA TNA Fellow, Khanim Garayeva, speaks about the project: ‘Calculations of similarities or distances in Peter Ackroyd’s historiographic metafictions and lexical diversity in Dan Brown’s straightforward storytelling’.
TNA ARCHIVES
The CLS INFRA Transnational Access Fellowship Programme funds scholars from literary studies or with an interest in Computational Literary Studies methods to visit leading research institutions and infrastructures and become part of the larger CLS community.
This archive includes interviews with the TNA Fellows on their experience, their research project and outcomes, video testimonials produced during their fellowship and access to their full reports. Check out the archives here.
D7.1: On programmable Corpora and DraCor
Work Package 7 of the CLS project, entitled “Building the Ecosystem of and for Programmable Corpora”, is developing a small-scale, but highly functional prototype for an infrastructural ecosystem for CLS research, following the concept of a network-based software architecture. The prototype, implemented as the multi-component system “DraCor” (Drama Corpora Platform), realizes the concept of “Programmable Corpora”, which is defined as corpora that expose an open, transparently documented and (at least partly) research-driven API to make texts machine-actionable. This report gives a detailed description of the DraCor system as a prototype for “Programmable Corpora”. It also shares two first experiments in adapting and transferring the approach of an API-based CLS research infrastructure to other systems and resources.
The first stable version of the DraCor API (1.0.0) was released in December 2023, marking a significant milestone in the system’s development. Watch this space for more announcements!
DraCor: Drama Corpora Project. Click logo for link.
CLS INFRA TNA Fellow Cassandra Ulph
In this video CLS INFRA TNA Fellow, Dr Cassandra Ulph, speaks about her project:’Developing Attribute-based Sentiment Analysis Model for Romantic-period Letters’.
CLS INFRA TNA Fellow Federico Pianzola
In this video CLS INFRA TransNational Access Fellow, Assistant Professor Federico Pianzola, speaks about the project: ‘Programmable Corpora as Linked Data’.
Training School: Madrid
From 9-11 May 2023, CLS INFRA offered a crash course in how to “Dig for Gold” in a corpus of texts. From Stylometry to Natural Language Processing, participants completed their own analyses and visualisations of the results in a hands-on way. We worked with existing code that is plug and play, so it was not necessary to have existing experience in Python or R. Most of all, it was a fun and safe environment to boost textual analysis skills.
Training materials will be available on DARIAH-CAMPUS soon.
CLS INFRA TNA FELLOW Ivan Pozdniakov
In this video CLS INFRA TNA Fellow, Ivan Pozdniakov, speaks about his project: ‘Building an R Package and Web Application to Interact Within a Digital Ecosystem for Literary Studies’.
Deliverable 5.1 Review of the Data Landscape
In this video PD Dr. Michal Mrulgaski summarises CLS INFRA Deliverable 5.1 ‘Review of the Data Landscape’. This landscape review focuses on intellectual access, i.e. providing guidance for finding and sharing literary data, while D6.1 approaches the task from a more technological side, collecting and analyzing literary corpora, available formats, tools, and metadata in order to create an exploratory catalogue / inventory of literary corpora and to provide a transformation matrix/toolbox for solving common issues. Yet we coordinate our efforts – beginning with the compilation of the table of literary collections – therefore one can regard these as two sides of the same coin. The review’s point of departure is the abundance of existing data and their diversity or heterogeneity as regards corpus design and underlying concepts, for example the definitions of text (is it a source, an edition, a data set? see chapter 3), the purpose of a corpus (e.g. general, reference, or monitoring corpora, special purpose corpora; see chapter 4), central considerations or criteria regarding the construction of a corpus (sampling, balancing, representativeness, annotation model(s), data format(s); see likewise chapter 4). How can I go about obtaining data without transgressing ethical or legal boundaries (see chapter 5)? We ask: How can we assist literary scholars in searching for and finding existing data that are relevant to their own research questions? And additionally, what kind of research question is relevant concerning the present-day state of the data landscape and literariness and textuality?
Srishti Sharma - Can a Book Make You Happy?
On Wednesday 29 June Srishti Sharma presented the results of her fellowship as a Transnational Access Research Fellow on the H2020 Computational Literary Studies project at GhentCDH. Her research project explores the effect of the emotions expressed in fictional novels on the emotions experienced by their readers. The corpus includes more than 400 English books from 9 different genres and their corresponding reviews from the Goodreads platform. Using sentiment analysis and emotion recognition she seeks to investigate the emotional links between genre, plot, and reader response.
CLS INFRA TNA FELLOW SRISHTI SHARMA
In this video CLS INFRA TNA Fellow, Srishti Sharma, speaks about her project ‘Can A Book Make You Happy?’ which is being hosted at Ghent University.
CLS infra tna fellow Riva quiroga
In this video CLS INFRA TNA Fellow, Riva Quiroga, speaks about her ‘Improving Part of Speech Tagging for Latin-American Spanish Corpora’ project which is being hosted at Charles University, Prague.
Cls Infra tna fellow lou burnard
In this video CLS INFRA TNA Fellow, Lou Burnard, speaks about his ‘Reviving the Victorian Play’s Project’, which is being hosted by the Moore Institute at NUI Galway, Ireland.
Deliverable 4.1: Skills gap analysis
We have explored gaps in teaching of research skills for computational literary studies to inform the CLS INFRA project’s own approach to training schools and chart the territory to gain broader insight into current CLS teaching practices. To understand supply we have manually annotated a sample of European university courses in Digital Humanities and summer school workshops. To index demand we set up an online survey to ask the community to evaluate a set of predetermined ‘skills’ based on its perceived future prospects in the field and teaching (1-5 scale response, 118 participants).
The survey also offered a chance to observe the demographic structure of the CLS community. The prevalence of early career respondents indicates a new generational wave within computational literary studies. Participant gender was balanced, although introduction of variables such as career stage, self-reported proficiency, and discipline demonstrated skewness. Researchers who work in the field of CLS also report more experience in computational methods, which suggests that these go hand in hand in current practice. Despite the gap in skills education being more general in nature, we identified areas of heightened interest. These are the skills that make up the backbone of computational research: from designing the study to text collection, to multivariate analysis and statistical modeling. Survey responses reiterated that the current gap in schooling is quantitative rather than qualitative. Moreover, there was a consensus among participants that the institutionalized training of a new generation of researchers is instrumental to disciplinary advancement of CLS.
Deliverable 3.1: Baseline Methodological User Needs Analysis
The purpose of this task was to identify, document and show-case best practices in CLS research in order to specify infrastructure requirements for the community. The central concerns of our study are data formats, tools and methods most widely mentioned in the publications related to CLS. These findings play an important role also for the training programme within the project, as they show what key qualifications are required for literary studies, what data formats researchers deal with and what methods and tools are especially relevant in the CLS field.
- Download and read this report here.
- Watch a summary of the findings on our YouTube channel.
Training School: Prague
The training school on Data and Annotation took place from 7 to 9 June 2022 and be hosted by the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague, Czechia.
The materials, videos of sessions, and other information can be found on the DARIAH campus.
KRAKÓW DH LUNCH: THE CLS INFRA PROJECT
CLS INFRA Principal Investigator, Professor Maciej Eder (IJP PAN) gives a quick tour around the CLS INFRA project for computational literary studies at the Kraków DH Lunch on 11th February 2022.
This special DH lunch introduces the Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS Infra) project – a multinational European collaboration to connect people, data, tools, and methods, focused on large-scale analysis of literary sources.
D4.1 SKILLS MATRIX SURVEY
Researcher profile: Professor Maciej Eder (PI)
In this video, our project’s Principal Investigator Professor Maciej Eder introduces us to the CLS INFRA project and how Computational Literary Studies methodologies and research intersect with his own scholarship and teaching. Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you don’t miss our upcoming researcher profiles.