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:
- reveal unknown instances of intertextuality,
- analyze intertextuality at various scales, from large to small, and
- 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.