Review: Discovering Intertextual Parallels in Latin and Greek with Tesserae

Review: Discovering Intertextual Parallels in Latin and Greek with Tesserae

By Julian Yolles | Mar 24, 2019

Gone would be the times whenever scholars of Ancient Greek and Latin literary works relied solely for a prodigious memory and a imprinted library of traditional texts, commentaries, and guide works. Digitized texts and brand brand new tools for textual analysis health health health supplement approaches that are traditional. These procedures don’t require a library that is physical in addition they vow to truly save some time to make new insights.

The Tesserae venture seeks to make use of electronic corpora to allow the consumer to get connections between texts.

As an example, you could look for correspondences between Apuleius’ Apologia and a message of Cicero, gauge the extent to which Apollonius of Rhodes used Homeric diction, or recognize Juvenalian tendencies in Jerome’s letters. You can also compare Greek and Latin texts and examine, as an example, just just how Sallust utilized Thucydides. While you could (but still should) look to commentaries and specific studies, Tesserae performs a concentrated analysis of two (sets of) texts, permitting the testing of long-held scholarly presumptions therefore the recognition of the latest relationships. Furthermore, since some texts incorporated into Tesserae’s corpus have never received committed studies and commentaries, users can create insights that are entirely new.

The Research menu provides the individual the substitute for search in Latin (the standard), Greek, English texts, plus in both Latin and Greek texts. How many Latin texts available (104, maybe maybe not counting authors detailed more often than once) is one of substantial, including not just classical authors but additionally a range that is impressive of traditional authors, and some (Early) contemporary numbers such as for example Melchior de Polignac and Francis Glass, composer of an earlier nineteenth-century biography of George Washington. Tesserae also provides a great quantity of Greek writers (71), like the mainstays of this curriculum that is classical a few very very early Jewish (Flavius Josephus) https://hookupdate.net/tr/sugarbook-inceleme/ and Christian article writers ( ag e.g., Clement, Basil, Eusebius). The English search choice, labeled as “untested,” provides eight authors/texts, including Shakespeare, Swift, plus the World English Bible.

The corpus of texts is compiled from an assortment of electronic databases, including The Latin Library, The Perseus Project, DigilibLT, the Open Greek and Latin Project, Musisque Deoque, and the Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum as the section on sources explains. A summary of sources for every single text is offered, including, where available, information regarding the printing supply of the electronic text. An individual probably know that the texts have now been modified “by changing the markup” and also by making changes that are“superficial orthography,” and therefore really should not be cited as representations for the published texts without dual checking.

The fundamental Research function permits an individual to choose A supply and a Target text. Supply represents the writing alluded to, Target the text that is alluding. This selection impacts just the purchase where the search engine results are presented, maybe perhaps not the search it self. Or in other words, the algorithm compares two texts for similarities, then shows the outcomes when you look at the chosen purchase to offer users the impression of concern or impact. Selecting Tacitus’ Annals as supply and Sallust’s Catiline as Target only will cause Tesserae to make the outcome in a anachronistic order, nevertheless the matching passages could be the just like if the purchase is reversed.

Choosing an writer populates another dropdown selection of games. There are numerous limitations in picking writers and texts. If one wanted to find evidence of Vergilian allusions when you look at the works of Tertullian, for instance, an individual could be necessary to perform split queries of all of the combinations in every one of the writers’ works. One cannot compare the entire Vergilian corpus with all of the works of Tertullian simultaneously. Alternatively, Tesserae is made to perform more focused analyses, which could create effective results.

To simply take advantage that is full of features, you need to make use of the Advanced Search choice ( simply simply click “show advanced” on any search web page) and browse the directions supplied. Users may then specify a variety of parameters, most of all, whether to find by

  • precise term (sequence)
  • lemma (disregarding conjugation or inflection)
  • semantic match (in line with the English dictionary headwords regarding the lemmata, therefore including synonyms and related terms)
  • lemma + semantic match (a combination associated with the past two)
  • noise (trigrams: in other words., any mix of three letters occurring both in texts could be flagged).

An individual can filter out of the sound and restriction the outcome, as an example by indicating how many stopwords, thus eliminating highest-frequency terms from outcomes. There are many different ways to fine-tune outcomes also to modify the order by which they truly are shown. By standard, email address details are purchased by the rating Tesserae assigns each communication (in decreasing purchase), in line with the frequency of unusual terms. Furthermore, outcomes may be exported as a tab-separated .

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