Distant Reading Novel Collections Released in ELTeC Version 0.5.0

One of the principal aims of our Action, Distant Reading for European Literary History, is to build a multilingual European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC), ultimately containing around 2,500 full-text novels in at least 10 different languages. Today, we are pleased to announce the first public release of ELTeC, with nine language collections included!

The ultimate aim is for ELTeC is to provide multiple collections of 100 novels published between 1840 and 1920 in their original languages. Work to add more novels to ELTeC is ongoing, as we aim to build a corpus which will aid us in our task to develop the resources necessary to change the way European literary history is written. Progress towards our goal and current statistics about the collections can be found on this ELTeC Summary page: https://distantreading.github.io/ELTeC/

Language collections in this first release are in German, English, French, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk), Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, and Slovenian. The collections can be downloaded here: https://zenodo.org/communities/eltec/

Each novel is encoded in compliance with the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and we have published details about the criteria for corpus composition and encoding guidelines here: https://distantreading.github.io/, and about our TEI schemas here: https://github.com/COST-ELTeC/Schemas/.

As work progresses on ELTeC, we invite you to use our collections. Feedback from the community would be very welcome as we improve our collections and work towards future releases. Please feel free to write to me or relevant Working Group Leader, Carolin Odebrecht with your comments, or submit to our GitHub issue tracker. If you are interested in becoming a member of our Action, find out more here: https://www.distant-reading.net/about/participate/.

Thanks to all of our colleagues from across Europe (and beyond) who have helped us to reach this important milestone!

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