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.

The project proposes to integrate, extend and harmonise national and regional efforts in the field of lexicography, both modern and historical, with the goal of creating a sustainable infrastructure which will (1) enable efficient access to high quality lexical data in the digital age, and (2) bridge the gap between more advanced and lesser-resourced scholarly communities working on lexicographic resources. The need for such an infrastructure has clearly emerged out of the lexicographic community within the European Network of e-Lexicography COST Action which will end in 2017. Current lexicographic resources, both modern and historical, have different levels of structuring and are not equally suitable for application in other fields, e.g. Natural Language Processing. The project will develop strategies, tools and standards for extracting, structuring and linking lexicographic resources to unlock their full potential for Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web, as well as in the context of digital humanities. The project will help researchers create, access, share, link, analyse, and interpret heterogeneous lexicographic data across national borders, paving the way for ambitious, transnational, data-driven advancements in the field, while significantly reducing a duplication of effort across disciplinary boundaries. ELEXIS will be carried out by a balanced consortium with distributed geographical origins. It is composed of content-holding institutions and researchers with complementary backgrounds - lexicography, digital humanities, language technology and standardisation - a crucial feature required to address the multi-disciplinary objectives of the project. In cooperation with CLARIN and DARIAH, it will focus on defining and providing common interoperability standards, workflows, conceptual models and data services as well as training and education activities focusing on user needs and cross-disciplinary fertilisations.

Europe has a long and rich tradition as a centre for the arts and humanities. However, the digital transformation poses challenges to the arts and humanities research landscape all over the world. Responding to these challenges the Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) was launched as a pan-European network and research infrastructure. After expansion and consolidation, which involved DARIAH’s inscription on the ESFRI roadmap, DARIAH became a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) in August 2014. The DESIR project sets out to strengthen the sustainability of DARIAH and firmly establish it as a long-term leader and partner within arts and humanities communities. By DESIR’s definition, sustainability is an evolving 6-dimensional process, divided into the following challenges: Dissemination: DESIR will organise a series dissemination events, including workshops in the US and Australia, to promote DARIAH tools and services and initiative collaborations. Growth: DESIR sets out to prepare the ground for establishing DARIAH membership in six new countries: the UK, Finland, Spain, Switzerland, Czech Republic and Israel. Technology: DESIR will widen the DARIAH research infrastructure in three areas, vital for DARIAH’s long-term sustainability: entity-based search, scholarly content management, visualization and text analytic services. Robustness: DESIR will make DARIAH’s organizational structure and governance fit for the future and develop a detailed business plan and marketing strategy. Trust: DESIR will measure the acceptance of DARIAH, especially in new communities, and define mechanisms to support trust and confidence in DARIAH. Education: Through training and teaching DESIR will promote the use of DARIAH tools and services. The DESIR consortium is composed of core DARIAH members, representatives from potential new DARIAH members and external technical experts. It is balanced between the different European regions.