I found that a key point in the workshop discussions was what the infrastructure for representing intertextuality should look like in the future. New means of intertextual search provided by Tesserae and Musisque Deoque make it easier than ever to find (certain kinds of) intertexts. But should it really be the case that individuals need to rerun certain searches again and again? I’m hopeful that the future agenda for the study of intertextuality will include the ability to store sets of intertexts for easy recall, search, and consultation. With luck, this would also mean that no such work is again consigned to oblivion by being forgotten as commentaries and other works age.
Development and maintenance of this kind of infrastructure is of course a big challenge. But I’ve been very encouraged by the work done by LOFTS and Pleiades toward an interface for marking up texts in ways that include intertexts. If we can find a way to deliver intertexts found by online search into this kind of editing environment, that will be a very large step. The question then becomes the best way to do this. Part of the work would lie in developing the correct markup tags to indicate intertexts. Another part of the work would lie in finding ways to transfer intertexts found in searches to the repository.
We could imagine a system where those who conduct searches on Tesserae or Musisque Deoque put a check next to the intertexts they find valuable. Clicking “submit” would send information about these intertexts to a repository. Specifically, it would create a set of annotations on a text linked through the universal resource numbers (URNs) provided by Canonical Text Services (CTS) that would go under the submitter’s username. The annotated texts in the repository could then be linked to text viewing sites like Perseus. That way, individuals using Perseus could choose to see, say, all the intertexts that had more than a certain number of votes, or all those to a given other text.
All this is a bit far off to be sure. But I hope that future work could take this direction, if not a better one.