136040 SE Intertextuality and text re-use (2024W)

No text stands alone: every text always refers to other texts, be it in the form of allusions, quotations, paraphrases, plagiarism, criticism, the adoption of motifs and structures or even variance between text versions. In literary studies, this phenomenon, which has of course been known for a long time, has been labelled ‘intertextuality’ for some years now, whereby the theoretical conceptualisations of intertextuality can be just as diverse and sprawling as the different forms of intertextual references.
Two challenges in particular arise when analysing intertextual references: On the one hand, such references have to be found in the first place; on the other hand, the diversity of possible references has to be sorted and categorised.

Computer-aided methods, such as those developed in the digital humanities and computational linguistics, particularly under the label of text reuse research, have recently offered new, high-performance tools and conceptual suggestions for both challenges. The modelling of word meaning with so-called word embeddings, for example, makes it possible to find not only literal references but also paraphrases in large digital corpora. Data models of the Semantic Web offer new possibilities for sorting intertextual phenomena into taxonomies or ontologies and making them retrievable. Intertextual references can be represented in visualisations and extended beyond texts with regard to intermedial references (e.g. text-image, but also text-practices).

What will be learnt?

The course aims to deal with both the literary conceptualisation of intertextuality and the digital methods of text reuse detection and to combine the two approaches in a hands-on project. Participants will therefore acquire knowledge and skills in both areas that can be applied to their own material.

In detail, the course content is as follows

- Exploration and critical review of classical concepts of intertextuality in literary studies through reading and discussion of essays and practical application of the concepts proposed in the approaches.
- Orientation on existing text reuse projects in the digital humanities.
- Familiarisation with and testing of different computational linguistic and DH approaches to text reuse detection (using Python notebooks).
- Getting to know and trying out different approaches to digital modelling of intertextuality in ontologies and data models.
- Finally, the acquired knowledge and competences will be consolidated in a smaller hands-on project either on your own or on given material and made usable for your own research.

Please bring your own laptop (with internet access) for the practical work! Previous knowledge of programming (Python) is not required, but is of course an advantage.