Digital Humanities approaches to cultural heritage have traditionally emphasized digitization, archiving, and long-term preservation (Marsili / Orlandi 2020). While essential, preservation alone does not ensure cultural continuity. For heritage texts to remain meaningful, they must also be accessible to contemporary audiences, particularly children, who represent future cultural custodians (Foka et al. 2018). Existing initiatives have advanced different aspects of this challenge: the CLiC/ChiLit corpus (Čermáková 2018) supports stylistic analysis of English-language children's literature, while the African Storybook (Reed 2019) promotes multilingual literacy in under-resourced African languages by creating openly licensed stories. However, neither integrates computational readability into cultural heritage preservation. This paper argues that computational readability can function as an active mechanism of cultural preservation, not merely a technical enhancement. As a case study, we present LEMI (https://www.lemi.ro/), a publicly available Digital Humanities platform for Romanian children’s literature, conceptualized as a form of living cultural memory (Chitez et al. 2024a).

LEMI is built around a curated digital repository of 250 children's literary texts in Romanian, comprising over 92,000 words and spanning grades 1–4 (ages 7–11). The corpus, compiled from school textbooks, educator recommendations, and publicly available sources, spans classical and contemporary literature by both Romanian and international authors. In compliance with Romanian copyright legislation (Romanian Parliament 1996), it provides representative text excerpts rather than full works, used exclusively for non-commercial educational and research purposes. Crucially, the corpus also recovers texts absent from or marginal within current curricula: literary fragments from older manuals, lesser-known works by canonical authors, writings by minority authors, and adapted texts reflecting historical educational practices. These materials represent cultural memory at risk of disappearing due to curricular standardization and shifts toward commercially dominant content. By bringing them together in a searchable, annotated repository, with metadata for author, genre, theme, age group, and reading difficulty, LEMI functions as a cultural archive documenting how childhood, education, and literary values have been linguistically constructed over time, aligning with perspectives that treat linguistic resources as intangible cultural heritage (Braber / Howard 2023).

Beyond digitization, LEMI operationalizes accessibility as a preservation strategy through a research-based readability model calibrated specifically for Romanian. The model employs four interpretable linguistic features (Average Sentence Length, Percentage of Complex Words, Unique Content Word Density, and Word Diversity) combined through a weighted scoring formula that avoids the syllable-based biases of English-centric metrics like Flesch-Kincaid, better capturing the morphological complexity of Romanian. Texts are classified into three readability tiers (easy, medium, challenging) within each grade level. A classroom-based validation study involving 256 primary school students (grades 3–4) from both urban and rural settings, reflecting varying levels of digital access and socio-cultural backgrounds, demonstrated strong alignment between automated scores and student judgments, with a 96.48% favorability rate (Oravițan et al. 2023). Users can browse the repository by readability criteria or upload their own texts for automatic assessment, making readability a mediating practice that ensures preserved texts can actually be read and reused by younger generations (Collins-Thompson 2014; Moley et al. 2011).

LEMI supports engagement at multiple levels. In classroom activities, children can explore the platform directly, searching for and selecting texts suited to their reading level, an interaction that transforms heritage texts into resources for active discovery. Educators and parents can use the readability features to identify age-appropriate materials for guided reading, while researchers can draw on the corpus for linguistic, literary, and educational analysis. A teacher training study involving 56 in-service teachers further demonstrated that LEMI supports pedagogical decision-making across educational levels (Chitez et al. 2026). This layered design acknowledges that children’s engagement with heritage literature is often mediated by adults, while also creating space for autonomous exploration in structured educational settings.

Methodologically, LEMI aligns with the small data paradigm in Digital Humanities, prioritizing curated datasets and interpretable methods over opaque large-scale models (Blanke & Prescott 2016). Its transparent features address ethical concerns around algorithmic bias and trust in educational contexts involving children (Baker / Hawn 2022; Khosravi et al. 2022). Conceptually, LEMI extends recent arguments that corpora constitute intangible cultural heritage by applying this perspective to children’s literature, a domain where linguistic simplification and selection practices reveal shifting educational ideologies and cultural priorities (Chitez et al. 2024b). By preserving not only texts but their readability profiles, LEMI documents how expectations of linguistic complexity and pedagogical suitability evolve over time.

By presenting LEMI as a model of heritage preservation through computational accessibility, this paper contributes to discussions on memory, responsibility, and engagement in Digital Humanities. The approach is designed to be transferable: the combination of curated corpora, transparent readability modelling, and layered user engagement offers a replicable framework for similar initiatives in other less-resourced languages and cultural contexts, particularly where literary heritage faces comparable risks of curricular marginalization. LEMI demonstrates that Digital Humanities tools can do more than store the past, as they can help ensure that cultural heritage remains readable, meaningful, and alive.