ULBS project uses code to study European tragedy

A two-and-a-half-year research project at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu is combining literary theory, cultural mapping and computational methods to study how European tragedy spread and changed across cultures. The METRA project is nearing completion with published findings, conference presentations and plans for additional outputs.

Why it matters: - METRA is pushing literary studies beyond close reading by using computational tools to examine tragedy across large European corpora. - The project adds to ULBS's profile as a research center in literary studies and digital humanities. - The work could shape how scholars study the movement of tragic forms, family conflict and cultural imagination across Europe.

What happened: - The METRA project — Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form — ran from Jan. 1, 2024, to June 30, 2026, at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. - The project was coordinated by Professor Emeritus Franco Moretti and funded through a PNRR I.8 grant. - METRA set out to study European tragedy through comparative literary analysis, cultural mapping and computational methods. - The research hypothesis treated European tragedy as a form that internalizes collective conflicts through family conflict.

The details: - The project combined literary theory, cultural history, comparative analysis and digital methods. - Researchers used natural language processing and computational text analysis to study tragic forms and their geographical and historical diffusion. - The work followed Franco Moretti's idea of