CLS INFRA has decisively advanced the field of Computational Literary Studies by creating the first integrated European infrastructure dedicated to literary data, tools, and research workflows. Before this project, the CLS landscape was fragmented: tools and corpora were dispersed across national initiatives, often lacking interoperability and accessibility. CLS INFRA overcame these challenges by unifying previously isolated resources and establishing common technical and methodological standards aligned with the FAIR and Open Science principles.
CLS INFRA’s innovations have redefined best practices in data management and computational research in the humanities. By producing open, interoperable, and reusable datasets, the project has made it possible for researchers to perform large-scale, multilingual, and cross-genre analyses that were previously unfeasible. Its technical developments have been adopted or cited by other infrastructure initiatives, amplifying its influence beyond the CLS domain.
The project has strengthened interdisciplinary collaboration between literary scholars, linguists, data scientists, and computer scientists—bridging communities that traditionally operated in parallel. This interdisciplinary infrastructure lays the foundation for the next generation of research on European cultural heritage.
The impact of CLS INFRA's Training Schools cannot be underestimated. They offered young researchers of different discipline backgrounds crash courses in essential skills needed for textual analysis.
The progress in developing, maintaining and testing the methods/tools/workflows should also be mentioned. CLS INFRA thus pushed the state of the art as it seeked to develop multilingual toolchains for scholars working on historical literary materials. All these tools are be available for free and open use.
Also, the project’s training ecosystem and TNA programme transformed community practice by embedding digital methods in the core of literary research training, thus institutionalizing computational approaches within traditional humanities frameworks.
Finally, CLS INFRA contributes to the preservation, accessibility, and understanding of Europe’s literary and linguistic diversity. By making literary data available in a structured, multilingual, and reusable form, it enables new comparative and cross-cultural analyses that strengthen Europe’s cultural cohesion and historical self-understanding. The project’s emphasis on Open Science and inclusive participation also advances democratic access to knowledge and reinforces the public value of humanities research.
Moreover, by engaging with non-academic user communities (identified in WP3), CLS INFRA has broadened the relevance of literary data and methodologies to domains such as policy analysis, education, and cultural mediation—thus ensuring that its societal benefits extend well beyond the academic sphere.
