InterStylar: A Stylometric Approach to Intertextuality in 12th century Latin Literature.

In authorship studies, scholars use quantitative techniques from stylometry to attribute anonymous texts to known authors on the basis of writing style. Intertextuality – the phenomenon where authors integrate and/or allude to other texts in their own work – poses an interesting issue here: should all 'intertext', such as citations or allusions, be removed from a text before we can reliably analyze its style? This project challenges the traditional view in stylometry that such 'Fremdkörper' are pure noise and seeks to verify the hypothesis that intertext constitutes a crucial aspect of an author's individual writing style. To this end, we analyze a representative corpus of 12th century Latin literature, circling around the impressive oeuvre of Bernard of Clairvaux, in which (biblical and other) intertextuality plays a dominant role. This project will employ recent advances in 'deep' representation learning which allows to model texts from the character-level upwards.

Keywords:ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, LITERARY CRITICISM, AUTHORSHIP, INTERTEXTUALITY

Disciplines:Artificial intelligence, Cognitive science and intelligent systems, Language studies, Literary studies, Theory and methodology of language studies, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Theory and methodology of literary studies, Other languages and literary studies