II Citations and Fragments: The Cultural Practice of Quoting in a Digital Age

Abstract

Previous research especially based on the concept of intertextuality has denoted an important shift in perspective considering the relationship between text and narrator. The distinction between narrator and voice or, as Roland Barthes formulated in the title of his famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), likewise Foucault, dispensed with the idea of authorship. This approach may also provide a deeper insight in the construction of fragments,
that – as has been rightly remarked – are made rather than born (Dionisotti, above). However, although prior work has already been focused on the possibilities of methods from the field of Information Retrieval especially concerning the digital editing of quotations and fragments, this study argues the importance of combining textmining methods with approaches from narratology.

Within the eAQUA project we adapt and use tools from the field of NLP (Natural Language Processing) to support our scientific work. In this paper we describe the extent to which the complex relationship between quotations as fragmentary texts and their surrounding context benefits from algorithm-based methods like word level n-gams as features in classification and referencing of fragments.

The examples described in this paper using eAQUA’s Citatongraph demonstrate that the Citationgraph gives an excellent estimate of quotations and text reuse. Concerning the question of fragments  this tool remarkably broadens our possibilities helping to ‘unearth’ fragments lost in the process of  editorial decisions. Representing a kind of ‘unediting’ whereby the various layers of editorial decisions can be decoded this new approach yields a promising new avenue of research.