The goal of the Tesserae Project is to offer ways of exploring allusion, intertextuality, and literary history that replicate and extend traditional approaches.
Tesserae offers a free website that offers various ways to explore intertextuality in ancient Greek, Latin, and English. The principal Tesserae search works by matching a minimum of two words (exact forms or lemmata) in each of two texts. These matches are then sorted by a formula that privileges relatively rare words in phrases that are close together. Testing of this approach on comparisons of Latin epic poems has shown that it can recover some two-thirds of parallels recorded by commentators.
Tesserae has also been shown to be able to add a third to the total number of recorded meaningful parallels between two texts. An example of a novel parallel revealed is notae fulsere aquilae (Civil War 1.244), referring to the glimmer of Roman eagles that frightens the citizens of Ariminum, echoing Vergil’s notis fulserunt cingula bullis (Aeneid 12.942), describing the glimmer of the baldric of Pallas that incites Aeneas to kill Turnus.
The Tesserae scoring system succeeds overall in arranging returned parallels in order of interpretive significance. Parallels ranked highest for significance by human interpreters also ranked highest in automatic scoring, as illustrated in the following chart.
Multi-text Search
Beyond its basic word matching search, Tesserae features several extended capacities. A separate multi-text feature allows users to see where a phrase matched in two texts occurs elsewhere in the language corpus.
Sound Matching
Matching by sound is available via the “character 3-gram” feature option from the main search pages. This can reveal sound repetitions like the following:
litus ut longe resonante Eoa / tunditur unda (Catullus 11.3)
“[India], where the shore is beaten by a far re-echoing eastern wave”
ante tibi Eoae Atlantides abscondantur (Vergil, Georgics 1.221)
“first allow the daughters of Atlantis to disappear in the east”
Vergil creates a sound echo by having Catullus’s already echoing (tunditur unda) sounds (ante . . . Eoa) “re-echo” (resonante) in his poem.
Theme Matching
Tesserae has an experimental feature that can match whole passages by similarity of theme, using and LSA topic modeling approach.
Greek – Latin Matching
Tesserae has made available a prototype Greek – Latin intertextual search. This depends not upon exact word or lemma matching, but rather upon matching by semantic similarity.
New Directions
Further goals for the project include refining current search capabilities and combining them into one complex search, to capture the remaining third of parallels and better sort them by type. They also include expanding search to additional languages. More information about the project is available on the Tesserae blog.