Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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Platonists). John Lee (2007) has conducted other work <strong>in</strong> textual reuse and explored sentence
alignment <strong>in</strong> the Synoptic Gospels of the Greek New Testament. He po<strong>in</strong>ted out that explor<strong>in</strong>g ancienttext
reuse is a difficult but important task s<strong>in</strong>ce ancient authors rarely acknowledged their sources and
often quoted from memory or comb<strong>in</strong>ed multiple sources. “Identify<strong>in</strong>g the sources of ancient texts is
useful <strong>in</strong> many ways,” Lee stressed: “It helps establish their relative dates. It traces the evolution of
ideas. The material quoted, left out or altered <strong>in</strong> a composition provides much <strong>in</strong>sight <strong>in</strong>to the agenda
of its author” (Lee 2007).
Authorship attribution, or us<strong>in</strong>g manual or automatic techniques to determ<strong>in</strong>e the authorship of
anonymous texts, has been previously explored <strong>in</strong> classical studies (Rudman 1998) and rema<strong>in</strong>s a topic
of <strong>in</strong>terest. Forstall and Scheirer (2009) presented new methods for authorship attribution based on
sound rather than text to Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong> poets and prose authors:
We present the functional n-gram as a feature well-suited to the analysis of poetry and other
sound-sensitive material, work<strong>in</strong>g toward a stylistics based on sound rather than text. Us<strong>in</strong>g
Support Vector Mach<strong>in</strong>es (SVM) for text classification, we extend the expression of our results
from a s<strong>in</strong>gle marg<strong>in</strong>al distance or a b<strong>in</strong>ary yes/no decision to a more flexible receiver-operator
characteristic curve. We apply the same feature methodology to Pr<strong>in</strong>ciple Component Analysis
(PCA) <strong>in</strong> order to validate PCA and to explore its expressive potential (Forstall and Scheirer
2009).
The authors discovered that sounds tested with SVMs produced results that performed as well as, if not
better than, function-words <strong>in</strong> every experiment performed, and thus concluded that “sound can be
captured and used effectively as a feature for attribut<strong>in</strong>g authorship to a variety of literary texts.”
Forstall and Scheirer also reported some <strong>in</strong>terest<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>itial results <strong>in</strong> explor<strong>in</strong>g the Homeric poems,
<strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g test<strong>in</strong>g the argument that this poetry was composed without aid of writ<strong>in</strong>g, an issue explored
at length by the Homeric Multitext Project. “When the works of Thucydides, a literate prose historian,
were projected us<strong>in</strong>g the pr<strong>in</strong>cipal components derived from Homer, Thucydides' work not only
clustered together but had a much smaller radius than either of the Homeric poems,” Forstall and
Scheirer contended, add<strong>in</strong>g that “this result agrees with philological arguments for the Homer's works
hav<strong>in</strong>g been produced by a wholly different, oral mode of composition.” The work of Forstall and
Scheirer is just one example of many among digital classics projects of how computer science
methodologies can shed new light on old questions.
The PDL has conducted some of its own experiments <strong>in</strong> automatic quotation identification. Ernst-
Gerlach and Crane (2008) <strong>in</strong>troduced an algorithm for the automatic analysis of citations but found
that they needed to first manually analyze the structure of quotations <strong>in</strong> three different reference works
of Lat<strong>in</strong> texts to determ<strong>in</strong>e text quotation alternation patterns. Their experience confirmed Lee’s earlier
po<strong>in</strong>t that text reuse is rarely word for word, though <strong>in</strong> this case it was the quotation practices of
n<strong>in</strong>eteenth-century reference works, rather than those of ancient authors, that proved problematic:
Quotations are, <strong>in</strong> practice, often not exact. In some cases, our quotations are based on different
editions of a text than those to which we have electronic access and we f<strong>in</strong>d occasional
variations that reflect different versions of the text. We also found, however, that some
quotations – especially <strong>in</strong> reference works such as lexica and grammars – deliberately modify
the quoted text – the goal <strong>in</strong> such cases is not to replicate the orig<strong>in</strong>al text but to illustrate a
po<strong>in</strong>t about lexicography, grammar, or some other topic (Ernst-Gerlach and Crane 2008).