Reading Thebaid 2

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Kyle Gervais of the University of Otago is working on a commentary on Statius Thebaid book 2, and emailed comments on  his use of Tesserae. It’s encouraging to see scholars putting the system to use in this way, and to get some perceptive feedback.

I’ve been using Tesserae in writing my commentary on Statius, Thebaid 2. Of course, it’s not my primary tool for tracking down intertexts, since it doesn’t understand context and doesn’t do synonyms or sound-alike words very well (although I understand that these are areas under development). I typically use it after I’ve written notes on a hundred lines or so, to help me catch any intertexts I’ve missed through traditional methods. I work at a slow pace (no more than two lines of poetry per day) and am very thorough in searching for intertexts (constant searches of the PHI database, consulting half a dozen ancient and modern commentaries and editions, trolling through papers on Statius and commentaries on other authors, and of course my own knowledge of the ancient sources)–so it’s impressive how many new intertexts Tesserae picks up. An example:

After finishing Theb. 2.1-101, I ran the lines against the Aeneid on Tesserae (using the basic search mode). I got 740 hits, and within 30-45 min. skimmed through to find 10 promising hits that I hadn’t found in the traditional ways (I’m sure I could have cut out a lot of the poor quality hits by manipulating the search settings, but I worry about missing things, and find it just as easy to skim). Of the ten, four led nowhere. Of the remaining six:

One reinforced an intertextual frame I already recognized (Hector’s epiphany in Aen. 2 as a frame for Laius’ epiphany): Theb. 2.101 pectora et has uisus fatorum expromere uoces, Aen. 2.280 compellare virum et maestas expromere voces. Obviously no one (including me) had thought to search for expromere uoces.

One helped to flesh out Laius’ role as an agent of discord: Theb. 2.99 infula per crines, glaucaeque innexus oliuae [/ uittarum prouenit honos], Aen. 6.281 ‘[Discordia] vipereum crinem vittis innexa cruentis‘. On a slow day, I might have searched the PHI for innex-, but on most days it would have seemed like a waste of time. Even if I had, I might have skimmed by Aen. 6.281 (since crinem wouldn’t have been highlighted).

Two revealed a subtle link between the underworld at Theb. 2.48ff. and Priam’s palace at Aen. 2.486ff.: 2.49 uacua atria ditat, 2.528 uacua atria lustrat; 2.51 stridor ibi et gemitus poenarum, atroque tumultu…, 2.486  at domus interior gemitu miseroque tumultu…. Never thought to search for uacua atria; never would have searched for gemit– + tumult-.

Two were really exciting:

Baccho + matres pointed to: Theb. 2.79f. ipse etiam gaudens nemorosa per auia sanas / impulerat matres Baccho meliore Cithaeron and Aen. 7.580ff. tum quorum attonitae Baccho nemora avia matres / insultant thiasis (neque enim leue nomen Amatae) / undique collecti coeunt Martemque fatigant. A clear intertext, and more importantly, a good (very modern and very much in Statius’ style) explanation for Baccho meliore, which has been a crux: Bacchus is ‘better’ than he was in the Aeneid.

Finally, Theb. 2.42 (a mountain’s shadow on the water) exigit atque ingens medio natat umbra profundo and Aen. 5.422f. (Entellus) magna ossa lacertosque / exuit atque ingens media consistit harena (note the added correspondence between exigit and exuit, which Tesserae can’t [yet?] pick up). It’s a genuine and interesting intertext, I think, but I never would have found it myself: the contexts aren’t obviously similar, I wouldn’t have had time to search the PHI for atque, ingens, or medius (too many hits), and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to search for combinations of any of those three words. It’s most exciting to me because it’s the kind of intertext that always gets missed since we’re not very good at thinking in the proper way (my comment on the link:  ‘An intertext perhaps best *read in reverse*, as an augmentation of Virgil: thanks to Statius the mighty Entellus casts a shadow big as a mountain’).

On the shores of Lake Geneva

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In early November, Chris and I will travel to the Fondation Hardt in Geneva for a conference entitled “Lucain et Claudien, face à face: Une poésie politique entre épopée, histoire et panégyrique.”

Chris will hold a workshop explaining how the online tools work and how to use them. I’ll be giving a presentation on Claudian, the late-4th century CE court poet, and how his epic makes use of the Civil War epic of his predecessor Lucan. My goal is to take advantage of Tesserae tools to offer a broader view of this interaction than has been available so far, and in the process to expand traditional conceptions of intertextuality a little.

The program is full of interesting topics to be addressed by distinguished scholars. We’re excited to be able to exchange views with this group. In particular, we’ll have a chance to speak face à face to Damien Nelis of Geneva and his colleagues and continue the discussion of our research partnership.

 

Unde Quoque

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It may seem odd for a digital humanities project begun in 2008 to get around to starting a blog four years later. Our only excuse is that we were concentrating on developing our intertextual study tools first. But the time for better communication is long overdue, so here we are!

It seems appropriate in our first post to say something about the origins and goals of Tesserae. The project started from a simple idea. In 2008, Amazon had a feature that showed users phrases that were particular, if not unique, to a given book. If it could tell what was rare in one book, surely that meant it was determining what phrases were common in multiple books. Amazon didn’t seem interested in pursuing this (the original feature was discontinued, I believe). But the Amazon feature, along with the emergence of plagiarism-detection software, prompted the question: Why not create a free website to automatically discover and analyze allusions that could serve as a resource for researchers, teachers, students, and the curious?

I took this idea to J.-P. Koenig of UB Linguistics, and in a rare absent-minded moment, he decided to humor me. We then started work on the project, joined by a talented Linguistics Ph.D. candidate, Shakthi Poornima. Progressive stages in the project’s development followed, traceable through the Older Versions link on the site’s main page.

The original idea eventually developed into the three main goals of Tesserae:

  1. reveal unknown instances of intertextuality,
  2. analyze intertextuality at various scales, from large to small, and
  3. use comprehensive surveys and precise criteria to better define the phenomenon of intertextuality.

Some part of this work is susceptible to rather finite measurements of progress, and at this point we can claim with some justification that we’ve taken big steps forward toward all three goals. A fuller declaration of victory might come if we’re able to replicate the results of traditional scholarship convincingly. But even then much would remain to be done: conducting intertextual readings, exploring theoretical ramifications, experimenting with intertextual analysis via a variety of language features, and repurposing the detection of various language features for other kinds of study.

For the foreseeable future, then, these goals represent crisscrossing paths on a research journey. We can plan to travel along enjoyably, even if we’re not sure where the end lies, or what we’ll find when we get there.