Computer-Assisted Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages

The production of digital critical editions of texts using TEI is now a widely-adopted procedure within digital humanities. The work described in this paper extends this approach to the publication of gnomologia (anthologies of wise sayings), which formed a widespread literary genre in many cultures of the medieval Mediterranean. These texts are challenging because they were rarely copied straightforwardly; rather, sayings were selected, reorganised, modified or re-attributed between manuscripts, resulting in a highly interconnected corpus for which a standard approach to digital publication is insufficient. Focusing on Greek and Arabic collections, we address this challenge using semantic web techniques to create an ecosystem of texts, relationships and annotations, and consider a new model – organic, collaborative, interconnected, and open-ended – of what constitutes an edition. This semantic web-based approach allows scholars to add their own materials and annotations to the network of information and to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings. keywords linked data; semantic web; digital edition; manuscripts; ontology; RDF; TEI; gnomologia; anthologies INTRODUCTION The TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) XML format has been widely adopted as the standard encoding for marking up textual data with semantic content [Mylonas & Renear, 1999; Pierazzo, 2011; Sperberg-McQueen, 1991]. The adoption of this standard in principle facilitates interoperability between different resources, enabling them to be used in combination for new research, and this publication strategy has been embraced widely in the digital humanities community. Lack of communication and failure to share research can still result in consolidation rather than expansion of information, the so-called ‘digital silo’ [Nichols, 2009; Zorich, 2008], but sometimes we also need to be able to do more with our texts than TEI currently allows. We are therefore extending the TEI model through our work on editing medieval gnomologia. Our manuscripts contain collections known as gnomologia, which consist of wise sayings containing moral or social advice, or expressing philosophical ideas. These are collections of extracts from earlier works, but were rarely straightforward copies. Sayings were selected from other manuscripts, reorganised, and modified or reattributed. The genre also crossed linguistic barriers, e.g. from Greek into Arabic, again rarely in straightforward translation. These changes often reflected a change of social context, especially between different cultural traditions. In later centuries, collections were translated from Arabic into western European languages. In all languages, such collections also informed the writing of continuous texts, of