This year’s Chicago Colloquium on Computer Science and Digital Humanities was hosted by the University of Chicago, November 17–19. Tesserae researchers presented two posters:
James Gawley, Christopher Forstall and Neil Coffee, “Evaluating the literary significance of text re-use in Latin poetry,” which showcased Tesserae’s scoring system; and,
Christopher Forstall and Walter Scheirer, “Revealing hidden patterns in the meter of Homer’s Iliad,” which presented results from Chris and Walter’s work on sound in Greek poetry.
While all the presentations were excellent, particularly interesting from our point of view were a number of papers which took a network view of intertextual relationships.
Hoyt Long illustrated literary coteries in Modernist Japanese poetry by analyzing the networks created when poets published in the same journals. He suggested some intriguing comparisons of similar networks from the same period in the USA and China. You can read more here.
Ryan Cordell and David Smith used some exciting methods in text alignment to locate stories reprinted with modification in antebellum American newspapers, even in very noisy texts, and then used network tools to analyze the connections between publishers. There’s a bit more here. Both this and the previous talk made exciting connections between geo-social networks in the real world and the literary networks of intertextual connections.
Mark Wolff showed a prototype interface to a database of text re-use in French western novels which allows users to visualize self-plagiarism and other text re-use as a web of connections. Try it here; read more here. This is particularly exciting for us, as our own multi-text search could perhaps one day feature a similar interface.
A lesson to be taken from all of these talks was that new light can be shed on intertextual relationships if one moves away from a binary or hierarchical framework toward something more complex and nuanced.
Martin Mueller’s keynote had particular resonance for digital Classics, reminding us that even as methods of analysis move forward, we continue to rely on old and poorly curated texts, in large part because our discipline no longer rewards editing and curation as it once did. This is a message that certainly resonates will all of us at Tesserae who have worked with adding texts…the labor involved in preparing digital texts is enormous, even when one has the benefit of the high quality data so generously provided by Perseus. It is astonishing that editing these texts is no longer acknowledged as serious scholarly work. Until academics are appropriately rewarded for their efforts in this domain, we will continue to find ourselves applying cutting-edge technology to shamefully outdated and noisy texts.