Machine Assisted Study of Writers’ Rewriting Processes

This paper presents a joint work between artificial intelligence and literary studies. As part of the humanities, textual genetic criticism deals with writers’ rewriting processes. By studying drafts and manuscripts issued from these processes, the genesis of the text is discovered. When draft comparison is done manually, it requires a huge amount of work. The introduction of the machine provides a high gain on efficiency and enables to focus on the interpretative work. The application we developed relies on a sequence alignment algorithm close to the ones used in molecular biology. This paper describes the textual alignment algorithm, presents an experimental validation, and illustrates the textual analysis with two genetic studies.