SrpELTeC logo
SrpELTeC
Serbian ELTeC sub‑collection • 1840–1920 • TEI/XML

SrpELTeC: Serbian Literary Corpus for Distant Reading

This is the Serbian novel collection for the ELTeC, the European Literary Text Collection, produced by the COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary History, CA16204.
Collection editor: Cvetana Krstev, JeRTeH & University of Belgrade;
Contributors: Ranka Stanković, JeRTeH & University of Belgrade; Aleksandra Trtovac, Vasilije Milnović, University Library “Svetozar Marković”; volunteers of Jerteh (Society for Language Resources and Technologies), the most active Duško Vitas and Ivan Obradović.

Get the corpus Browse corpus Read publications

Sources

University Library “Svetozar Marković”, National Library of Serbia, "Matica srpska" Library, Library of SASA, Library of Serbian Literature Department at the Faculty of Philology UB, private library Cvetana Krstev & Duško Vitas

License

All versions of SrpELTeC are freely available under CC‑BY 4.0.

Citation

Please cite the publications listed below (see Publications).

Abstract

The corpus SrpELTeC was developed within COST Action CA16204 Distant Reading for European Literary History. Novels were selected, prepared, and annotated using ELTeC-wide principles. All texts are manually encoded in TEI with rich metadata and structural annotation, while automatic annotation includes POS‑tagging, lemmatization, and named entities, relying on JeRTeh language resources. SrpELTeC integrates with Wikidata via SPARQL queries and offers a Linked Data/NIF edition prepared within COST Action CA18209 NexusLinguarum. All versions are open under CC‑BY.

Key Features

Curated selection

100 novels (1840–1920) chosen to balance gender, length, period coverage, and canonicality.

20 novels in extended collection from the same period

TEI Level‑1 & Level‑2

Manually curated TEI headers and structure following TEI Level‑1 guidelines;

Tokenization, sentences, POS, lemmas, and seven named entity classes (PERS, ROLE, LOC, ORG, DEMO, EVENT, WORK) following Level‑2 guidelines.

Infotheca special issue

Infotheca - Journal for Digital Humanities, Vol 21 No 2 (2021), issue dedicated to the srpELTeC collection.

Logo

Tooling

Annotations using tools integrated via JeRTeh pipelines. TXM for textometry ; UnitexGramLab; SrpKor4Tagging-TreeTagger models for Serbian.

Linked Data

Wikidata integration: SPARQL queries with diverse visualizations and SrpELTeC-NIF (NIF, NLP Interchange Format) export.

Open & Reusable

Openly available data (CC‑BY) with reproducible metadata and clear versioning.

Collection at a Glance

100+20 novels • 66 authors
4.93M words • 368k sentences
149k paragraphs • 20,851 pages
250,340 named entities (7 classes)
TEI editions: Level‑1 & Level‑2 annotations

Platforms & Access

Downloads

Explore Online

Linked Data & SPARQL

The SrpELTeC Linked Data edition uses NIF and maps NE classes to Wikidata/OLiA/DBpedia categories. A public Apache Jena Fuseki endpoint is available at JeRTeh for exploration and SPARQL queries.

Example (Jakov Ignjatović nouns): Retrieve most frequent nouns for an author.

SPARQL example (inline snippet) 
PREFIX nif: 
PREFIX xsd: 
PREFIX dc: 
PREFIX wd: 
SELECT ?lemma (COUNT(?lemma) AS ?count)
WHERE {
    ?subject nif:lemma ?lemma ;
             nif:posTag "NOUN"^^ ;
             nif:referenceContext ?novelid .
    # Jakov Ignjatović
    ?novelid dc:creator wd:Q570913 .
}
GROUP BY ?lemma
ORDER BY desc(?count)

Serbian Wikibase hosted on Wikibase Cloud. This Wikibase instance is used for experiments linking the Serbian ELTEC NIF corpus to an Ontolex-Lemon dictionary.

Selected publications

Key references (selection):

  1. Ranka Stanković, Cvetana Krstev, and Duško Vitas. SrpELTeC: A Serbian Literary Corpus for Distant Reading. Primerjalna književnost 47, no. 2 (2024).
  2. Cvetana Krstev The Serbian Part of the ELTeC Collection Through the Magnifying Glass of Metadata. Infotheca, vol. 21, no. 2, 2021, pp. 26-42.
  3. Aleksandra Trtovac, Vasilije Milnović, Cvetana Krstev. The Serbian Part of the ELTeC - from the Empty List to the 100 Novels Collection.a> Infotheca - Journal for Digital Humanities, [S.l.], v. 21, n. 2, pp. 7-25, 2021.
  4. Ranka Stanković, Cvetana Krstev, Branislava Šandrih Todorović, Dusko Vitas, Mihailo Skoric, and Milica Ikonić Nešić Distant Reading in Digital Humanities: Case Study on the Serbian Part of the ELTeC Collection. LREC 2022 Conference Proceedings, edited by Nicoletta Calzolari et al., ELRA, Paris, 2022, pp. 3337–3345.
  5. Milica Ikonić Nešić, Ranka Stanković, Christof Schöch, and Mihailo Škoric From ELTeC Text Collection Metadata and Named Entities to Linked-data (and Back). 8th Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics within the 13th LREC, ed. Thierry Declerck et al., ELRA, 2022, pp. 7–16.

Acknowledgments

Supported by COST Action CA16204 (Distant Reading), the TESLA project (Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia, PRIZMA, Grant 7276), COST Action CA18209 (NexusLinguarum), and Wikimedia Serbia (WikiELTeC).

Contact

For inquiries, data access, or collaboration proposals:

  • Cvetana Krstev — ORCID 0000-0003-3328-9392
  • Ranka Stanković — ORCID 0000-0001-5123-6273
  • Duško Vitas — ORCID 0000-0003-4194-692X

© SrpELTeC project • Content under CC‑BY 4.0.

SrpELTeC logo