Over the course of the past two days, here at the beautiful grounds of the Fondation Hardt, we have been inspired and challenged by diverse new work—both literary and digital—on issues of intertextuality in Classical texts and beyond. In particular, I was thrilled to see the elegance with which the team from Musisque Deoque has combined phonological, metrical and lexical features in their online search tools for Latin poetry. I was also excited by the way in which both digital and non-digital scholars were rethinking the boundaries of intertext, especially with respect the constraints of poetic form and of memory. Not only the ideas, but also the modes of thought and communication have been varied, from traditional close readings to real-time software demonstrations, with lectures and presentations in English, French, and Italian, intense discussions in small breakout groups, relaxed conversations over wine and coffee, and now even ex tempore composition of blog entries.

I’ve made a couple of resolutions over the course of these meetings, and perhaps if I state them publicly here I’ll be forced to keep at least some. In no particular order:

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The Intertextuality workshop held at the Fondation Hardt has been particularly helpful to show the importance of digital tools for understanding the phenomenon of intertextuality and getting more results about the relationships among texts.

I have particularly appreciated the group discussion on the second day of the workshop, where participants have been able to discuss about the meaning of intertextuality and its application to different texts and different levels of “textuality” within a text and among texts.

The workshop has focused the attention of the participants on three main topics that are strictly connected to intertextuality: 1) philology; 2) commentary; and 3) publications.

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As a book-oriented library scholar interested in the intertextuality of Latin poetry, I found the Geneva workshop on “Intertextuality and Digital Humanities” to be valuable because it has made me more familiar with a new set of research tools in a fast-developing area that has the potential to revolutionize the reading and interpretation of ancient literature for students and scholars alike. In particular, I welcomed the opportunity to hear from the representatives of different digital humanities projects (Tesserae, Musisque Deoque, eTraces, and LOFTS) about the technical aspects of digitization and data analysis. Marco Buechler’s treatment of intertextuality in the corpora of English translations of the Bible referred to a parallel between a source text and a target text as “reuse.” I don’t know where this term comes from, but it may be helpful to distinguish “reuse” from “use.” For example, to talk about the “spoliation” of classical monuments to decorate late antique monuments could be “use” (serving a present need) or “reuse” (a self-conscious reference to the past). For more on the theory of use and reuse, see Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney, eds. Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine (2011), especially p. 112, where Kinney cites and builds on Anthony Cutler, “Use or Reuse? Theoretical and Practical Attitudes toward Objects in the Early Middle Ages”, in Ideologie e pratiche del reimpiego nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro ltaliano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 46 (2 vols, Spoleto: Centro ltaliano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1999), vol. 2, pp. 1055-83.

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This two-day workshop has been a fruitful occasion to meet scholars who, like we, agree about the practical utility of DH in order to solve a secular (or better, millennial) problem. Since Philology’s origins, the transit and the reuse of the elements of a text into another have always been considered as one of the main objectives of our discipline. It is now time to improve, adapt and, to a certain extent, create from the beginning digital libraries provided with IT research tools capable of analyse texts in order to catch sight of their mutual echoes and relationships. This way, one will identify every (aware or unaware) presence of memory of a poet within the rewriting activity of every other poet, so that what is usually just postulated, or also proved in an occasional and extemporaneous way, can find objective – or rather, ‘scientific’ – confirmations. The more or less systematic and complete textual exegesis mast be accompanied, sustained and presumably anticipated by accurate data analysis.

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As my current project is a philological commentary on a Latin poem, it was extremely helpful for me to hear various perspectives on practical questions which arise in writing a commentary or intensively studying the intertextual associations of a passage. Discussion focused on how to handle the enormous volume of data generated by digital tools such as Tesserae and Musisque Deoque. These tools shift part of the scholar’s focus from collation of data to the creation of efficient, large-scale representations of results. A related question concerned the methods by which scholars should communicate such work. One vision involved a publicly accessible repository of ancient texts where scholarly interpretation of allusion is communicated in part through text markup. The challenges to making this vision a reality are well-known: unlike other humanities fields, there is no generally accepted mechanism in place as yet for peer review of collaborative digital work in classics.

Pedagogy was briefly mentioned in various discussions, and might be profitably made a theme for a future session. We might want to reflect not only on how to teach our students to use the currently available digital tools but also how to best apply the abilities our students already have as so-called “digital natives.” Many of our students think of digital tools as primary and print-based tools as secondary, and of writing an app as the natural way to solve a problem rather than turning to an app only when traditional philological methods have proven insufficient. How to meet our students’ needs and how to decide which of the skills they already possess are applicable to the questions being asked in our field are questions well worth our consideration.

What a wonderful occasion! So much that I didn’t know, so many kind and tolerant people to talk to.

People are important: the question we pose to the machines, the individuality we bring to the interpretation of the data (even if perhaps individuality could perhaps be supplemented by more maths). The study of Latin poetry is probably the area in classical literature which at the moment gives freest scope for aesthetic interpretation and for close reading; it also seems to be the area where digital studies are most advanced. The union of elements is well expressed by the idea of a selective, interpretative, and artistically written commentary, supplemented by links to massive online stores of intertexts and further data.

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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.

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(From Manca, M., L. Spinazzè, P. Mastandrea, L. Tessarolo and F. Boschetti. 2011. “Musisque Deoque: Text Retrieval on Critical Editions.” Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics 26: 129-140)

The Musisque Deoque Project (MQDQ) aims at creating a digital archive of Latin poetry, from its origins to the late Italian Renaissance, equipped with critical apparatus and various exegetical and linguistic information. This project is focused on the study of synchronical and diachronical intertextuality as illustrated, e.g., in Cicu (2005). For this reason, we give strong attention to formal and material aspects of the text that actually played a relevant role in the poetical tradition. The fixed text of printed critical editions, aimed at the reconstruction as close as possible to the lost originals, provides just a snapshot of the tradition, which is intrisically dynamic, and gives to the modern reader a distorted image of what an ancient text was in fact.

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Monica Berti
Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities – University of Leipzig
monica.berti@uni-leipzig.de

The Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series is a new effort within the Open Philology Project of the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig. The goal of this series is to establish open editions of ancient works that survive only through quotations and text re-uses in later texts (i.e., those pieces of information that humanists call “fragments”). In the field of textual evidence, fragments are not portions of an original larger whole, but the result of a work of interpretation conducted by scholars who extract and collect information pertaining to lost works embedded in other surviving texts. These fragments include a great variety of formats that range from verbatim quotations to vague allusions and translations, which are only a more or less shadowy image of the original according to their closer or further distance from a literal citation. Continue reading →