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In recent years, Romanian literary studies took one of its major methodological turns toward distant reading, using either or both quantitative and computational analysis. While quantitative analysis employed lexicographical instruments such as dictionaries and literary chronologies, computational analysis tried to approach the issue from a “data rich” historical perspective (Katherine Bode), while also attempting to build a digital corpus adapted to computational methods. The following paper attempts to survey the main research projects that deal with the computational analysis of Romanian literature in general and the Romanian novel in particular. The first part of the study undertakes a succinct state-of-the-art on past and ongoing endeavours concerned with digital approaches to the study of Romanian literature, their initial findings and potential. The second part will take a more theoretic approach to some of the key concepts related to data supported literary history. Finally, the last part of the study tackles the main challenges of developing a digital corpus of a local literature and the shortcomings related to this literature’s “locality” in terms of computational approaches and the compatibility of the tools developed by Western research projects.

The present study proposes an experimental exploration of the Romanian novel written between 1920 and 1940 through the use of stylometry, a method of distant reading employed for the statistical analysis of style. Drawing from the most recent advances in the field of computational stylistics, we select a formal standpoint from which we seek to investigate the relation between the Romanian novelistic canon and minor, tertiary novels published in the same period. In our test cases, we will attempt to establish some of the more promising aspects of stylometric analysis, as well as single out the experiments that yield no relevant result. Because of the relative novelty of the method, the purpose of our investigations is to offer a kind of pilot experiment that can illustrate the benefits of using computational methods on Romanian literary corpora.