Digital, mehrsprachig, interdisziplinär, vernetzt: die COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary History

What opportunities and challenges arise for European literary historiography when literary texts are increasingly available in digital form? The project "Distant Reading for European Literary History" addresses this question and combines research and networking. Funded as a COST Action since 2017, the initiative has since been able to form an interdisciplinary and international network of researchers from literary studies, computational linguistics and the digital humanities, who are developing resources and tools to provide European literary history with a rich digital and multilingual database. The central project goal is the publication of the "European Literary Text Collection" (ELTeC), in which corpora of 100 novels each from the period 1840-1920 in 16 different European languages will be created. But the project is also working on the multilingual compatible linguistic annotation of these data and the recording of the conceptual consequences of a data-based literary history.