Bioinformatics and Classical Literary Study

This paper describes the Quantitative Criticism Lab, a collaborative initiative between classicists, quantitative biologists, and computer scientists to apply ideas and methods drawn from the sciences to the study of literature. A core goal of the project is the use of computational biology, natural language processing, and machine learning techniques to investigate authorial style, intertextuality, and related phenomena of literary significance. As a case study in our approach, here we review the use of sequence alignment, a common technique in genomics and computational linguistics, to detect intertextuality in Latin literature. Sequence alignment is distinguished by its ability to find inexact verbal similarities, which makes it ideal for identifying phonetic echoes in large corpora of Latin texts. Although especially suited to Latin, sequence alignment in principle can be extended to many other languages. keywords intertextuality; sequence alignment; Latin; literature; computational biology; natural language processing 0 INTRODUCTION The Quantitative Criticism Lab (QCL; www.qcrit.org), directed by the co-authors, grew out of shared interests in classical intertextuality dating back to a seminar taught in 2009. The idea for a collaborative and interdisciplinary study of intertextuality was first discussed by us in January 2014, inspired locally by Dexter’s work in computational biology and globally by the rise of the Digital Humanities and “big data” approaches to cultural study. We have since published articles on a range of topics in both humanities and science journals, and QCL has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Neukom Institute for Computational Science. QCL maintains a physical lab space at the University of Texas at Austin, but the project team includes scholars from a number of different institutions, in addition to undergraduate research assistants and high school students and teachers. The impetus for bridging the disciplines of biology and literary study is both cultural and methodological. The cultural motive derives from the familiar analogies often drawn between literature and living organisms, whether the use of trees or woods as a metaphor for literary works and traditions, or the imaginative casting of poems and books as living embodiments or descendants of their author. Such analogies have a long pedigree and have taken many different forms: one famous