CATMA moves FORWARD (Foundational Overhaul for Research Workflows for Annotations by Requirements-based Design)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Evelyn Gius
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 575795006

CATMA is an advanced, open-source Digital Humanities tool that bridges qualitative and quantitative approaches to text analysis while fostering collaboration and reproducibility. Its undogmatic, flexible annotation framework enables researchers to develop and adapt their own tagsets and interpretations without being constrained by rigid taxonomies, making it ideal for exploratory and interdisciplinary research. The tool’s modular architecture supports a seamless workflow from close reading and qualitative annotation to quantitative text mining and visualization, while its Git-based backend and JSON API ensure interoperability with widely used research solutions (e.g., Python, Jupyter, NLTK). CATMA’s long-standing development history, demonstrated academic impact, and adoption in numerous funded research projects and doctoral studies highlight both its maturity and ongoing relevance. Its emphasis on collaborative functionality, standard-compliant data export (TEI-XML), and integration with computational pipelines positions it as a scalable and sustainable platform capable of meeting the needs of both novice humanities scholars and advanced computational researchers. At the same time, to fully realize CATMA’s potential and secure its long-term viability, it is essential to have a phase of substantially expanded development capacity. Without sustained and intensified development, CATMA risks falling behind evolving technological standards and user expectations, jeopardizing its relevance and usability. Key issues—such as outdated architecture, limited interoperability, and a non-intuitive GUI—must be addressed urgently to prevent growing maintenance burdens and user attrition. The proposed work in the project therefore focuses on four essential deliverables: a robust, well-documented public API to ensure seamless data access and interoperability; a modular, fully decoupled system architecture to improve maintainability and scalability; a redesigned, user-friendly GUI to enhance usability and broaden adoption; and a set of improved core functionalities tailored to research needs. These goals cannot be achieved incrementally or ad hoc—they require concentrated development expertise.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)