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Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2016

Rethinking intertextuality through a word-space and social network approach – the case of Cassiodorus

Résumé

Continuous space representations of words are currently at the core of many state-of-the-art approaches in computational linguistics. The distributional hypothesis, summarised as: 'You shall know a word by the company it keeps' [Firth, 1957] is the basis of many such methods. In this paper we use this type of representation, which has seen little to no use in digital humanities, to rethink the concept of intertextuality. We present and use an alternative conceptual concept of intertextuality to ascertain how different persons are portrayed in a late antique letter collection, the Variae of Cassiodorus (ca. 485–585 AD). We combine this approach with the well-explored method of network analysis. 'The study of intertextuality is the study of a certain kind of relation between texts: One text quotes another or others.' [Edmunds, 2001]. Until recently, intertextuality has been pictured as an interaction between different texts, which has been restricted to the surface forms. We want to transcend this rather limited, one-dimensional concept of intertextuality by using high-dimensional word representations which effectively abstract away from such surface forms. Instead of conceptualising, e.g. Vergil, as the sum of his transmitted oeuvre, we represent him both as a node in a network, and a vector in high-dimensional space. In this way we overcome the border between text and historical person; a border which impedes the ascertaining of the intertextual impact of authors which are partially or not at all preserved. We create word-space representations based on the letters in the Variae, using methods based on distributional semantics [Mikolov et al., 2013a, Levy et al., 2015]. In antiquity, the editing and publication of letter collections was a fundamental tool for literary and cultural self-representation. Late antiquity witnessed the zenith of this practice with the publication of several such collections, both in Latin and in Greek. The Variae of Cassiodorus are an excellent example of this practice of self-representation [Bjornlie, 2012, Gillett, 1998]. In this paper, we will represent Cassiodorus, his contemporaries, and influential authors of the literary canon, such as Vergil, in one and the same network. This form of visualisation can generate a more nuanced view on how Cassiodorus constructs a cultural profile for himself and his peers. Indeed, the letters of Cassiodorus act as a meeting ground in which both the contemporaries of Cassiodorus, as well as the authors who shaped the intellectual outlook of Cassiodorus and his peers, interact with each other.
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Dates et versions

hal-01279833 , version 1 (01-03-2016)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01279833 , version 1

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Johannes Bjerva, Raf Praet. Rethinking intertextuality through a word-space and social network approach – the case of Cassiodorus. 2016. ⟨hal-01279833⟩
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