Computational Literary Studies (CLS) is a new area of studies, established partly due to the activities of the CLS INFRA project (2021-2025). The participants of CLS INFRA conducted training activities, wrote field studies and literature reviews and offered fellowship opportunities to ECRs, in order to support the recognition of CLS as a field of study at an international level.
The key motivation for the activities mentioned above was to support the consolidation of Computational Literary Studies as a distinct subfield within the Digital Humanities. The primary kind of impact we were looking for was, in that sense, to develop networks and collaborations. Indirectly, we also aimed to foster research excellence.
The target audience was the community of practitioners of computational literary studies research in Europe and beyond, but also traditional literary scholars, as well as computational linguists.
The CLS INFRA (Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure) project is aimed at transforming how European literary heritage was accessed, studied, and shared by consolidating fragmented resources and building a sustainable research infrastructure for computational literary studies (CLS). Recognizing that literature serves as a rich archive of human values, norms, and creativity, the project was founded on the premise that literary texts are not only cultural artefacts but also valuable sources of data. It responded to a growing community of researchers using computational methods to investigate Europe’s multilingual and interconnected literary history.
At its core, the project sought to provide unified and easy access to high-quality literary data and analytical tools. It focused particularly on narrative prose, poetry, and drama, aiming to make data FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) and compliant with legal and technical standards. The participation of key infrastructures like DARIAH ERIC and CLARIN ensured that the project’s results were not only widely adopted but also sustainable within broader European digital research environments.
CLS INFRA placed a strong emphasis on community engagement. It mapped user requirements within the CLS community and designed API-enabled “Programmable Corpora” to bridge the gap between user needs and the fragmented reality of existing resources. The project developed and optimised Natural Language Processing tools, workflows, and training materials to support both new and experienced users in applying computational methods to literary research.
Through a series of collaborative initiatives, including training schools, policy engagement, and shared resource development, CLS INFRA fostered networks of scholarly exchange and institutional cooperation. Its outputs included integrated tools, multilingual corpora, documentation toolkits, policy briefs, and explainer videos, all designed to advance the digital transformation of literary studies. Ultimately, CLS INFRA created the foundations for a cohesive, inclusive, and technologically advanced research ecosystem in the field of CLS. By addressing infrastructural fragmentation and promoting methodological innovation, the project made a lasting contribution to consolidate the newly emerged field of Computational Literary Studies.
The foundation, in 2022, of the Journal of Computational Literary Studies (JCLS, https://jcls.io) and of the annual Conference of Computational Literary Studies (CCLS) connected to the journal, with the support of CLS INFRA, has been a major signal of impact. In the first years of their existence, JCLS and CCLS have already developed into pan-European and international venues for presentation and publication of research in CLS.
The impact of the network represented by CLS INFRA is clearly visible in CCLS and JCLS. Many of the presenters and authors are in some way affiliated with CLS INFRA or its predecessor project, the COST Action “Distant Reading for European Literary History”. Also, the broad representation of authors from a wide range of countries and distinct analysis undertaken within literary texts in a wide range of languages, shows the influence of the European network.
Beyond the conference and journal, the rise of Computational Literary Studies can also be seen in some quantitative indicators. For example, the number of articles mentioning the phrase “Computational Literary Studies” in Google Scholar has steadily risen over the years, from 32 in 2019 to 188 in 2024. Google Ngram data for the time period 2003 to 2022 shows that the phrase “Computational Literary Studies” has been on the rise since approximately 2016, and has overtaken the (broader) phrase “Computational Humanities” after 2019.
To some extent independently, but still in connection to CLS INFRA and under the inspiration of individuals who became central to CLS INFRA, a few other initiatives were initiated at roughly the same time. These included the German Research Foundation’s priority programme on Computational Literary Studies, as well as ADHO’s Special Interest Group: Digital Literary Studies (SIG DLS), or Federation of Stylometry Labs (FoSL), in addition to a few research projects which were later referred to as CLS, funded by several national research agencies (DFG, NCN, FWO etc.). The culmination of these related initiatives was the EU project CLS INFRA, that at its core aimed at consolidating the resources, tools, methods, people, and training into a unified field of CLS.
Part of the objective of this research was to address the fragmented landscape of (literary) datasets. While a decade ago, researchers routinely used their own tailored collections of, say, a few dozen novels, acquired from various sources, today’s landscape is substantially different, with several high-quality corpora of literary texts, usually accompanied with well-curated metadata. Due to the CLS INFRA’s immediate predecessor – the COST Action “Distant Reading” (2017-2022) – researchers can work with a rich corpus of European novels, whereas CLS INFRA supported and popularized the corpus DraCor, containing hundreds of dramatic texts across several European traditions. These two resources alone led to several papers that pioneered and further developed the field of CLS.
While these developments have certainly not been driven by CLS INFRA alone (other developments include, for example, the German Research Foundation’s priority programme on Computational Literary Studies), the pan-European nature of this development clearly shows CLS INFRA’s significant contribution to this development.