News of a new ELTeC-related project from Action member Roxana Patras.

Pop-Lite: Romanian Popular Novels and Their Sub-genres during the Long Nineteenth Century: digital editing and corpus analysis is a pioneer Romanian initiative that combines DH tools and methods with traditional approaches to Romanian literary history and theory. The project aims to address the lack of digitized resources, corpora, and customized tools for the treatment of modern Romanian typographic varieties, to save non-canonical works from oblivion, and to find practical solutions for processing and storage. The creation of an open-access literary corpus for the study of 19th-century Romanian popular novels and for the exploration of local subgenres (“hajduk”, “mystery”, “historical”, “sentimental”, and so forth) will enable a critical mass of researchers to engage in analyzing the effects of “distant reading” approaches to the Romanian patrimony as well as to arrive at a computationally-driven approach to genre theory. Traditional concepts such as literary canon, periodization, authorship, literary movement, genre, and others will be redefined through a threefold focus on: a. popular literature (para-literature, genre literature); b. 19th-century European contexts; c. digital literary studies.

Illustration by Ionita Benea

Pop-Lite is a project that draws from the research experience acquired by its PI (Roxana Patras, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi) and members while taking an active part in our COST Action, Distant Reading for European Literary History, and in the bilateral French-Romanian project Hai-Ro: Hajduk Novels in Romania during the Long Nineteenth Century: digital edition and corpus analysis assisted by computational tools.

Pop-Lite will start on 1 September 2021, and is funded by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development, and Innovation Funding (Romania) under the program PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2019.