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This article examines the ways in which distant reading, as a facet of the digital turn in the humanities, has affected the study of literature, with particular attention to the ways the digital turn has impacted the examination of authorship, genre, and style. In the process, it reflects on the ways in which distant reading developed both as a concept in the history of world literature and as a methodological approach that contributed to the evolution of computer-assisted study of literature.Cet article examine les façons dont la lecture à distance, en tant que facette du virage numérique dans les sciences humaines, a affecté l’étude de la littérature, avec une attention particulière aux façons dont le virage numérique a influencé l’examen de la paternité, le genre et le style. Dans le processus, il réfléchit sur les façons dont la lecture à distance a développé à la fois comme un concept dans l’histoire de la littérature mondiale et comme une approche méthodologique qui a contribué à l’évolution de l’étude assistée par ordinateur de la littérature.

This paper presents the annotation of spatial entities in a corpus of Romanian novels written mainly in the 19th century and featuring as their main character a figure very well-known in the Balkans, the Hajduk outlaw. Because of their nomadic lifestyle, Hajduks were experiencing a unique relation to space, which was very different from that of the majority of Romanians, who lived in villages at the time. To verify if this different vision reverberates in novels, the aim was to collect all nominal and adverbial phrases referring to space, thus going largely beyond toponyms, that are usually marked-up and examined in digital humanities and natural language processing projects. After a presentation of the main differences between our approach and those prevailing in older or more recent studies in spatial literary analyses, we focus on the elaboration of the annotation scheme and comment upon the results of the inter-annotator agreement, as measured on a set of ten fully-annotated samples, of a thousand words each, from our novels.