Text+ is the German distributed research data infrastructure for literary studies, linguistics, and spoken and written language. Its resources consist of contemporary and historical literary and media texts, deeply annotated material, transcripts of spoken and sign language, and original recordings. Text+ provides access to its resources according to the FAIR guidelines: Findable due to standard-conformant metadata, Accessible with single sign-on authentication, Interoperable via open data formats, and Reproducible through web services and extensive documentation. The 30+ partners of Text+ are archives, libraries, universities, and other research institutions. The partners are autonomous, and they differ in the amount of data and processing capabilities they provide. In this paper, we describe the hub architecture of Text+, which gives users a central and FAIR point of access to research data that continues to be distributed across the Text+ partner institutions. The architecture serves as a blueprint to evolving research infrastructures that aim at maintaining (and empowering) their research data contributors.

The annotation and automatic recognition of non-fictional discourse within a text is an important, yet unresolved task in literary research. While non-fictional passages can consist of several clauses or sentences, we argue that 1) an entity-level classification of fictionality and 2) the linking of Wikidata identifiers can be used to automatically identify (non-)fictional discourse. We query Wikidata and DBpedia for relevant information about a requested entity as well as the corresponding literary text to determine the entity’s fictionality status and assign a Wikidata identifier, if unequivocally possible. We evaluate our methods on an exemplary text from our diachronic literary corpus, where our methods classify 97% of persons and 62% of locations correctly as fictional or real. Furthermore, 75% of the resolved persons and 43% of the resolved locations are resolved correctly. In a quantitative experiment, we apply the entity-level fictionality tagger to our corpus and conclude that more non-fictional passages can be identified when information about real entities is available.