The iLCM project pursues the development of an integrated research environment for the analysis of structured and unstructured data in a ‘Software as a Service’ architecture (SaaS). The research environment addresses requirements for the quantitative evaluation of large amounts of qualitative data using text mining methods and requirements for the reproducibility of data-driven research designs in the social sciences.

The iLCM research environment is based on the Leipzig Corpus Miner (LCM), a decentralized SaaS application for the analysis of very large amounts of news texts developed in a previous Digital Humanities project. The general text mining tools of the LCM are supplemented by an Open Research Computing environment (ORC) for active executable documents, so-called ‘notebooks’. This novel integration allows the standardized processing of large amounts of unstructured text data and the application of individual scripts derived from separate research requirements to the same data.