CLS INFRA D7.1 On Programmable Corpora

While the discipline of Computational Literary Studies (CLS) consolidates, infrastructural challenges arise that have to be addressed to ensure that good, sustainable and open scholarship can be carried out in this dynamic field of Digital Humanities research. In this situation, 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.