The HAI-RO project: a new offshoot of the Distant Reading COST Action

We are very happy to announce that Action members Roxana Patraș and Ioana Galleron received approval for funding their project HAI-RO (Hajduk Novels in Romania During the Long Nineteenth Century: Digital Edition and Corpus Analysis Assisted by Computational Tools) within the “Brâncuși” Program for Integrated Actions. Even if the acronym HAI-RO originally stood for “Romanian hajduk” we like to think of it more in the terms of its literal translation: “Come on, Romania!”

The program rests on an enthusiastic collaboration between the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași and Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, which started when the project’s principal investigators decided to experiment on a series of TEI-XML novels for ELTeC (the “European Literary Text Collection” developed within the Distant Reading COST Action. This further lead to the formation of a French-Romanian team whose members are Camelia Grădinaru, Ioana Lionte and Alexandra Oltean (both of them Training School grantees), Lucreția Pascariu, Chiara Mainardi, and Ofra Lévy.

In a nutshell, the project seeks to remedy the shortcomings of the resources and tools specially designed for the Romanian Computational Literary Studies. The research will focus on the characterisation of the features that are inherent to “the hajduk literature” by adapting the specific instruments of corpus linguistics to the specificities of literary texts printed in non-standardised Romanian. This will be completed with an analysis of the external features developed along the historical evolution of a literary genre that has generally been labelled as “national”.

The main result of the project will be the creation of a Romanian literary corpus (1850-1950) conformant with the XML-TEI international standard of digital editing and including semantic annotations. The project will be accessible on an Open Access basis and will be stored on the Nakala platform (France) and signalled on HAL-SHS. In accordance with its scientific objectives, the project will produce a schema and an annotation guide for spatial terms, both adapted to literary texts. It will also provide a rich input for the Romanian collection of ELTeC.

For more details, visit the HAI-RO project website at: https://proiectulbrancusihairo.wordpress.com