“Introducing the World Literature Data Collective”

From a .txtlab (McGill University) Blog Post:

The goal of globalizing our understanding of storytelling has long been a dream of literary studies. And yet the development of what has come to be known as “World Literature” has been hampered by some severe limitations. First, there are a lot of human languages! No one researcher can command even a small fraction of the total. Second, there are a lot of stories! No one researcher can command even a fraction of the total of one language in even one period. Third and finally, there is no standard corpus, collection or dataset of world literature. There is no agreed upon definition let alone list of the books that should be included or studied.

This is where the World Literature Data Collective (WLDC) comes in. We are a volunteer collective aimed at pooling different language expertise to digitize small collections of stories across a large number of languages and cultures. Our goal is to model World Literature as the set of regional literatures across the world, thereby promoting a comparative approach to understanding human storytelling.

Learn More, Read the Complete Post

Direct to World Literature Data Collective (WLDC)

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