The project Bilateral Lusophone Literature Initiative using GIS and Linguistics (BILLIG), proposed by the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC) and the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Oslo (ILOS), was approved for funding by the Bilateral Relations Fund of the EEA Grants program.

The purpose of the BILLIG project is to create synergies between the IHC’s experience in applying Geographic Information Systems and online databases to historical and literary research and the ILOS experience in the use of computational linguistics applied to literature. Daniel Alves and Diana Santos, the project principal investigators, expect to “to find a way to combine the two approaches and make use of good practices already existing in the two institutions, fostering access and analysis of large collections of Portuguese literary texts.”

The project was submitted in the framework of the IHC Digital Humanities Lab, will run for one year (between September 2019 and August 2020), and will include training workshops, exchanges and several meetings between Lisbon and Oslo.