# CLS INFRA: Leveraging Literary Methods for FAIR(er) Science

Julie M. Birkholz, Ingo Börner, Floor Buschenhenke, Joanna Byszuk, Sally Chambers, Vera Maria Charvat, Silvie Cinková, Tess Dejaeghere, Anna Dijkstra, Julia Dudar, et al.

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► To cite this version:

Julie M. Birkholz, Ingo Börner, Floor Buschenhenke, Joanna Byszuk, Sally Chambers, et al. CLS INFRA: Leveraging Literary Methods for FAIR(er) Science. Digital Humanities Conference 2025, Jul 2025, Lisbon, Portugal. 2025. [https://hal.science/hal-05098718](https://hal.science/hal-05098718)

HAL Id: hal-05098718

https://hal.science/hal-05098718v1

Submitted on 6 Jun 2025

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# CLS INFRA: Leveraging Computational Literary Methods

**AUTHORS:** Julie M. Birkholz, Ingo Börner, Floor Buschenhenke, Joanna Byszuk, Sally Chambers, Vera Maria Charvat, Silvie Cinková, Tess Dejaeghere, Anna Dijkstra, Julia Dudar, Matej Durčo, Maciej Eder, Jennifer Edmond, Evgeniia Fileva, Frank Fischer, Vicky Garnett, Françoise Gouzi, Serge Heiden, Sarah Hoover, Michal Křen, Els Lefever, Michał Mrugalski, Ciara L. Murphy, Carolin Odebrecht, Eliza Papaki, Marco Raciti, Emily Ridge, Salvador Ros, Christof Schöch, Artjoms Šeļa, Toma Tasovac, Justin Tonra, Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, Peer Trilcke, Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Lisanne M. van Rossum, Vera Yakupova.

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14 European Institutions

75 contributors and researchers

28 deliverables

CLS INFRA is a 4.5 year partnership to build a shared resource of high-quality data, tools and knowledge to aid new approaches to studying literature in the digital age. CLS INFRA aligns diverse resources together, adds tools needed to interrogate them, and widens their user base. The results benefit researchers by bridging gaps in computational literary studies and beyond, offering opportunities to create new research and insight into our shared and varied European cultural heritage. This poster represents the latest CLS INFRA deliverables and resources.

## Introducing VELD, Expanding CLSCor.io

One of the central goals of CLS INFRA is to develop a conceptual model to harmonise and formalise the description of objects, starting with the corpus. This was introduced as CLSCor, an ontology and a catalogue.

A Transformation Toolkit was developed to improve interoperability among corpus data and tools through format conversions. An integrated Tool Inventory represents a registry of resources: which tool can be used with what corpus.

Versioned Executable Logic and Data (VELD) introduces a generic wrapper for data and executable code which allows definition of complex processing chains while ensuring reproducibility and repeatability. VELD is applicable to all kinds of tasks including NLP annotations, various kinds of analysis, and even computing statistics. Visit all these at CLSCor.io.

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<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Pie Chart Graphic by Sitiyah from Noun Project (thenounproject.com) (CC BY 3.0)</figcaption></figure>

## User Needs Beyond Academia

Within the area of "Applied Humanities", the power of narrative and storytelling are ever more present. Through interviews with journalists, policy makers, GLAM sector and Medical Humanities experts, CLS INFRA has outlined major benefits to those fields in exploring CLS tools and methods.

Besides the report (D3.5 Report on Understanding User Requirements Beyond Academic Research), we developed infographic posters, videos and web pages available for view or download at CLSINFRA.io/beyond_academia.

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## Prototypes and Pipelines: NER, REX, ABSA

CLS INFRA has dived deep into research on and evaluation of three Natural Language Processing methods, including the generative AI often used with them.

These are Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relational Extraction (REX) and Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). In addition to three reports (D8.3-5), you can access all information including a sample dataset, Python packages, and Juypter Notebooks exploring these

aspects of NLP.

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<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>Strategy Graphic by Sitiyah from Noun Project (thenounproject.com) (CC BY 3.0)</figcaption></figure>

## Reproducibility, Re-usability, Programmability: DraCor

Since the earlier reports on building the ecosystem of Programmable Corpora, the team has stabilised the DraCor platform and extended the "programmable corpora" model into a standards-compliant, extensively documented service.

Central is DraCorAPI v 1.0, whose version-prefixed paths, harmonised entity names and machine-readable OpenAPI description give scholars a reliable, citable interface to more than 20 drama corpora with almost 4.000 plays.

An accompanying ODD schema and emerging ontology aims to make every feature traceable from TEI source to JSON response. To widen interoperability, DraCor now implements Distributed Text Services (DTS) endpoints.

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## Training and Internationalisation

### Training Schools:

After an analysis of skills gaps across CLS methods (D4.1: Skills Gap Analysis), CLS INFRA in collaboration with DARIAH CAMPUS produced three Training Schools targeting key skills needed by scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds, nationalities, and experience levels.

### Further Training:

In 2025, CLS INFRA is producing three further training sessions following a survey of participants in the TNA Fellowship and Training Schools programmes.

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Charles University, Prague

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UNED, Madrid

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ACDH-CH and DH-Potsdam, Vienna

### Transnational Access (TNA) Fellowships

Between 2021 and 2024, CLS INFRA institutional partners across Europe hosted 47 #TNA fellows for between 2 and 12 weeks each to provide access to a wide range of data, tools, and knowledge. Scholars from literary studies, computer science, linguistics and data science travelled and stayed free-of-charge, exploring or advancing their own projects with CLS experts. Read more at the TNA Archive: CLSINFRA.io/opportunities/tnafellowships/tna-archive or in the publication D9.1: TNA report, including process documentation and impact analysis (August 2025).

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Kompetenzzentrum
Trier Center for Digital Humanities

Computational Literary Studies
Infrastructure (CLS INFRA) has
received funding from the European
Union's Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme under grant
agreement No 101004984.

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**CITATION:** Birkholz, Julie M., et al. "CLS INFRA: Leveraging Computational Literary Methods." Zenodo, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15311787.

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<|/> CLSINFRA