Patrick J. Burns

Associate Research Scholar, Digital Projects @ Institute for the Study of the Ancient World / NYU | Formerly Culture Cognition, and Coevolution Lab (Harvard) & Quantitative Criticism Lab (UT-Austin) | Fordham PhD, Classics | LatinCy developer

Ciceronianus/Christianus/Other: Experimenting with a Multilabel Classification Approach to Latin Intertextuality Using Jerome’s Letters

Abstract for paper at Zitieren Als Narrative Strategie Formen, Funktionen Und Methoden Von Referentialität im Werk Des Kirchenlehrers Hieronymus’, Universität Konstanz. October 17.

Abstract

This paper presents experiments in measuring intertextuality in Latin texts using document classification with the goal of lexicon induction. Lexicon construction allows us assign all words in the collection a source-specific weights that can help us measure and map intertextual patterns. For this set of experiments, I use a simple word-based text classification approach to distinguish between the works of Cicero and the Vulgate, inducing a Cicero-Vulgate lexicon based on the feature importance from the classifier. It is not only that we learn from this experiment that certain words like res, senatus, and natura are strongly associated with Cicero texts and that words like dominus, deus, and anima are strongly associated with the Vulgate, but more importantly we get relative weights for all words in the vocabulary. Through these weights, we can do something more than detect that allusive activity may be present in a text; we can identify and illustrate changing patterns of intertextuality throughout a text. Moreover, I argue here that this approach, by changing the source texts and varying the number of classification labels, offers a novel way to read and analyze intertextuality in Latin literature.