Digital Humanities 2010

The study of intertextuality, the shaping of a text’s meaning by other texts, remains a laborious process for the literary critic. Kristeva (Kristeva, 1986) suggests that "Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.& The nature of these mosaics is widely varied, from direct quotations representing a simple and overt intertextuality, to more complex transformations that are intentionally or subconsciously absorbed into a text. The burden placed upon the literary critic to verify suspected instances of intertextuality is great. The critic must reference a large corpus of possible contributing works, and thus must often be familiar with more texts than was the author whom they are studying. Since, in many cases, the problem is one of pattern recognition, it is a good candidate for automated assistance by computers.