Understanding literary history is a fundamental component of the literary studies curriculum (Summit 2010). Traditionally, students have been introduced to the discipline from a historical perspective, often following a linear temporal progression that outlines literary periods, or simply using centuries and national or linguistic boundaries as markers. In many academic settings, such as in Germany, students of literary studies often also pursue teacher training. Consequently, they learn about literary history as future mediators of a constructed (national) literary tradition. However, as many critics have pointed out in recent decades, doing literary history poses certain challenges: Which texts are read and which are forgotten? Who becomes part of the canon, and how does this intersect with power relations? What kind of literary history are we teaching if we only address a very small part of the literary archive?

Outside of the increasingly popular but not yet widespread digital humanities programs, literary history is generally taught through the lens of hermeneutics, or, less frequently, social history. Complementing these, digital humanities and computational methods can offer promising solutions to questions about large-scale phenomena over long periods of time. By working quantitatively with large data sets—some call them capta to emphasize their constructed nature (Drucker 2011)—computational literary studies strive to "explain, or to provide, general laws of literature, and even of history and culture" (Bode 2023, 547).

While scalability in data analysis offers broader perspectives, it does not eliminate the need for narrativization. Any literary history inherently synthesizes information and reduces complexity. Expanding the data set accentuates potential issues related to data selection (Herrmann and Lauer 2018). So the process of building a corpus doesn’t eliminate the challenges of hermeneutic or social-historical literary history. Rather, the practices of quantitative research tend to expose problems around canonicity, periodization, and intersectionality, by making the selection process transparent. The same holds true for diagrammatic visualizations, which play a crucial role in quantitative analysis. They explain relationships and developments within literary history by providing visual frameworks for concepts of time and change, causality, and continuity (Börner et al. 2016). Therefore, a key advantage of computational literary studies is its ability to identify and address selection processes and blind spots (Herrmann et al. 2025), while critically engaging with issues like availability, selection, bias, and canonicity in the narrativization of literary history (Underwood 2019).

We discuss these questions using an interactive Open Educational Resource (OER) in data literary studies as a case study. This OER introduces concepts such as modeling, operationalization, corpus building, and various measures of quantitative analysis to students and teachers of literature who are not yet familiar with digital humanities methods. Through this example, we highlight how fostering data literacy in students equips them with the skills to critically engage with narrative constructions of literary history.

How does one revive an older database once the software it was built with is no longer supported, and after project funding run out? How does one honour and preserve the work of past scholars while making the database fit for future generations? In this presentation, the formal launch of the SHEWROTE database, we discuss our experience redeveloping a heritage database originally created in 2001, as Women Writers (www.databasewomenwriters.nl), revamped in 2014 as NEWW: New Approaches to European Women’s Writing (https://womenwriters.rich.ru.nl/womenwriters/vre/), and finally redeveloped as SHEWROTE (Studying Historical Early Women’s Reception: Oeuvres, Texts, Engagements) (https://shewrote.rich.ru.nl/), from 2023 onward.

The evolution of the database over decades, including several major technical overhauls, meant that research questions, scope, and (implicit) ontologies also changed significantly between 2001 and today. The data in the first versions of the database was uneven in geographic and temporal scope, and displayed gaps resulting from the different research questions historians had sought to address with it. The single biggest challenge, however, was the lack of a formal data model, and ontologies that had been developed implicitly and heuristically by past generations of researchers. Our first major decision in reviving the database, therefore, was to rethink and restructure the data completely, from the ground up, moving from a non-SQL structure (a SORL platform) to a SQL one (a Django solution).

The old databases provided an exceptionally rich dataset detailing the many forms that the reception of women writers and their works had assumed from Antiquity to circa 1945. This data had been structured, over the years, not from decisions made in a ‘top-down’ data model, but bottom-up, as researchers heuristically described the material they were dealing with when collecting data for the first iterations of the database. But between 2001 and 2023, two new digital projects addressing women’s authorship, both offshoots of the Women Writers project, the RECIRC (https://recirc.universityofgalway.ie/) and MEDIATE databases (https://mediate-database.cls.ru.nl/about/), revealed important new facets of our type of data. This included the need to create a separate, new field distinct from Reception: Circulation, or the historical movement of physical copies of works by women writers, as attested for example by private and institutional libraries, across time and space.

In this presentation, we discuss how we modelled, implemented and populated the new Circulation field, using both data already present in the old database, and importing new datasets from other databases. With modern geo-referencing tools and analytic computing power now at our disposal, our ability to visualize the physical circulation of books – for example, through time-lapse maps illustrating the geographic movement or spread of specific works – has expanded exponentially. At the same time, creating such visualizations underlines other significant data gaps, including North-South data inequities and the lack of historical gazetteers documenting historical place names and the changing administrative entities with which they were associated throughout the long period covered by the SHEWROTE database. Although the public version of the database has now been launched, therefore, future challenges remain ahead that our project will continue to tackle.

DigitalSEE is a comprehensive multimodal project dedicated to extracting and structuring historical data from diverse sources such as Ottoman travelogues, woodcuts, and archival materials. Its primary data sources include the renowned collections of Felix Kanitz, Karel Škorpil, and Konstantin Ireček. The project employs a non-proprietary, well-documented XML format with capabilities for exporting information in TEI XML format, while future developments aim to integrate the CIDOC-CRM standard for enhanced interoperability. By meticulously tracing sources and analyzing both textual and visual content, DigitalSEE focuses on the perception and reception of artifacts and monuments across time.

The objective of DigitalSEE is to conduct a diachronic study of cultural heritage and identity in the Balkans during the 18th and 19th centuries. The project places special emphasis on historical frameworks derived from Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Ottoman Period. Such an approach facilitates a nuanced understanding of the evolution of cultural landscapes and national identities, especially in light of the Eastern Question and the nation-building processes in Southeastern Europe during the 19th century. The integration of European travel writings, diplomatic records, and cartographic sources—particularly along the Via Diagonalis and the Danube—further enriches the study by providing context and detail about the region’s historical transformation.

At the technical level, DigitalSEE is powered by a Python Flask web application that serves as the backbone for data processing, input, storage, and retrieval. This application features a form-based input system that accepts text, images, and geographic coordinates, linking data to geospatial databases such as GeoNames and Pleiades. The platform supports data storage in XML and JSON formats, while offering map visualizations that enable users to explore the historical data interactively.

The workflow underpins the project, with custom-built XML and JSON master files ensuring efficient data management. The system is designed to convert and preserve historical information in a standardized TEI XML format. Furthermore, the data structure incorporates modified metadata encoding to capture heterogeneous source properties, including detailed dating, provenance, and geospatial information. Elements such as detailed descriptions of materials, dimensions, and architectural features are used to reconstruct a broader archaeological and historical context.

Future plans for DigitalSEE include the integration of a specialized image recognition model
based on a curated image dataset and a pre-trained model. Advanced topic modeling algorithms will be employed to identify clusters of similar words and facilitate research-assisted interpretation of the texts. In addition, a multimodal pipeline is under development to process sources in 18th-century Latin, German, and Old French. This pipeline leverages transcription tools like Transkribus and Kraken, along with natural language processing libraries such as spaCy’s LatinCy and the Classical Language Toolkit. The resulting data, enriched with metadata and linked to external resources, will further support spatial analysis and visualization in GIS applications, ensuring a comprehensive exploration of the Balkans’ historical heritage.

The Biblissima portal is a discovery tool for specialized digital resources in the field of ancient written heritage, ranging from the earliest Mesopotamian clay tablets to the first printed books.

It is the centrepiece of Biblissima's infrastructure, a project for the creation of a digital research infrastructure that has been funded by the French Government since 2012. The portal was launched in 2017 and has since continuously ensured the interoperability of diverse and complementary data sources.

The portal thus aggregates digital data on early manuscripts, incunabula and printed works, and provides access to digitised documents, catalogues, scientific databases, illuminations, an iconographic thesaurus and soon electronic editions.

The Biblissima portal stands out as an innovative tool for several reasons:

• It provides a unified access point to heterogeneous digital resources, serving both the general public and the most specialised researchers in the field.

• It enables the post hoc aggregation and interoperability of disparate datasets, building a reference tool that no single source provider could produce independently.

• It utilises the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) standard for disseminating images online, allowing direct access to primary document images, along with advanced features where available (such as full-text search, content indexes, and annotations).

• It offers innovative, user-friendly search and navigation interfaces, including an iconographic exploration tool, providing a structured and efficient starting point for researcher’s investigation while encouraging critical reading of the search results without masking the shortcomings of the source databases or their contradictions.

The portal facilitates direct access to resources that are otherwise difficult for the general public to reach. It also establishes itself as a reference tool for research in the field of ancient written cultures, whose authority is being built up over time, in conjunction with the other research communities that develop components of the broader infrastructure (such as tools for analysing and processing primary data, such as the eScriptorium HTR platform). It thus plays a stabilising and consolidating role for each of its data sources, while providing undeniable added value in terms of international visibility.

To illustrate how the Biblissima portal has become an essential tool for research into ancient written cultures, the talk will be divided into three parts. The first part will demonstrate a typical research journey within the discovery tool, showing how search results are arranged to facilitate connections and entry points for launching a critical investigation. This quick overview will then provide a better understanding of the data interoperability method, its issues and its challenges. The final section will focus on the roadmap currently being drawn up to enhance the usefulness and authority of the portal. This includes improvements to search and navigation interfaces and the development of a coordinated “data governance model” involving source database contributors who wish to participate in the portal’s evolution. Through these efforts, Biblissima aims to strengthen its role as a research infrastructure coordinating the development of a key reference tool in the field of ancient written cultures, fostering cross-research opportunities, knowledge consolidation, and new discoveries.