Tesserae Intertext Service: Intertextual Search Access to Digital Collections in the Humanities

FAIN: HAA-258767-18

University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN 46556-4635)
Walter J. Scheirer (Project Director: June 2017 to July 2023)
Neil Coffee (Co Project Director: August 2017 to July 2023)

Participating institutions:
University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN) - Applicant/Recipient
SUNY Research Foundation, Buffalo State College (Buffalo, NY) - Participating Institution

The further development of the Tesserae search engine to be used with additional online collections to enhance research into intertextuality.

From its inception in 2008, with support of an NEH ODH Start-Up Grant in 2012-2013, the Tesserae Project has developed a uniquely successful approach to tracing literary, linguistic, and intellectual history in ancient Greek and Roman literature, as well as a selection of English texts. The Tesserae web tool (http://tesserae.caset.buffalo.edu/) allows users to automatically find instances where one author quotes or alludes to another, or employs similar concepts. This project will support the creation of the Tesserae Intertext Service (TIS). TIS will make the Tesserae search capability available as a new and sophisticated way of accessing the many existing humanities texts that have been digitized, showing all the similarities between the works selected by a user. TIS opens the door for scholars, students, and the general public to answer fundamental questions about the human condition that require traversing languages, genres, and histories in expansive digital collections.