In spite of decades of studies and manifestos arguing for the ‘use’ of the humanities for various purposes, from their capacity to form citizens (Nussbaum, 1998, 2010) through to more specific appeals to their potential to improve technology development (Madsbjerg, 2017), the idea of an ‘applied humanities’ has yet to fully take explicit hold within our training and research paradigms. In spite of this, however, appeals to the humanities-relevant power of narrative and storytelling seem ever more present in new journalism, brand narratives, and even narrative economics (Shiller, 2019). For this reason, we reviewed literature on applications of fiction, literary studies, or CLS outside of the academy to identify professionals who could benefit from this CLS infrastructure. In conversations with those professionals, we aimed to understand how the field would have to further develop to take into account the needs specific to their field. In the first section, the literature review of the CLS INFRA D3.5 report aims to make transparent the utility of the potential infrastructure (answering also the question of utility for whom) instead of taking the risk of obscuring its applicability through consideration of data collections, services, communication channels, and other design choices underpinning research infrastructures. This report explores not only the needs and methods of currently known and clearly emerging user groups but also of potential users from outside of the academy. The second section on the interviews describes potential user stories and requirements from 15 focussed interviews with professionals from the field of policy, journalism, art, consultancy publishing, medicine, and bibliotherapy. From these conversations, we infer potential use case scenarios for applications of literature and CLS beyond academia.

This research was conducted within the framework of the European-funded Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS INFRA, https://clsinfra.io/) project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004984, which aims to build a shared and sustainable infrastructure for literary studies with digital tools.

The interview data set can be found here: https://zenodo.org/records/12784256