Classical Intertextuality and Computation / Presented by: Pramit Chaudhuri
Channel: COERLL
Date: 2016-04-06

Pramit Chaudhuri, Dartmouth College

This presentation surveys three tools for detecting intertextual parallels focused on Latin literature. Two tools, Diogenes (https://community.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Diogenes/) and Tesserae (http://tesserae.caset.buffalo.edu/), are publicly available, and one is currently being developed in a collaborative and interdisciplinary project based at Dartmouth College. Attention will be paid to the different methods underlying the tools and their relative aptitudes for detecting various kinds of intertextual relationship: verbal, semantic, aural, etc. We will consider applications of the tools not only within the mainstream of Classics research but also to less well known texts and traditions that straddle conventional departmental boundaries. Finally, the presentation will also include a brief account of the development of the Dartmouth project, which has relied on significant contributions from undergraduate students, and the pedagogical use of all three tools in an advanced Latin course on Vergil’s Aeneid. Throughout the presentation, the perspective taken will be that of a non-Digital Humanist exploring the possibilities for research and teaching enabled by computation and by collaboration with specialists in computation.