Sources of Enlightenment: Identifying Borrowed Passages in the Encyclopedie using Sequence Alignment.

FAIN: RF-50003-09

University of Chicago (Chicago, IL 60637-5418)
Robert Morrissey (Project Director: September 2008 to November 2010)

Stanford University professor Dan Edelstein and the ARTFL project of the University of Chicago propose to bring the power of machine-assisted learning and text-mining techniques to bear on the difficult question of the Encyclopedie's relationship to past thinkers. Data-mining techniques will allow us to focus on all forms of citation, allusion, borrowing, and outright plagiarism in the Encyclopedie, through which we hope to reach a more thorough and quantified understanding of the status and state of knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment while at the same time reflecting on the use and development of data-mining techniques in the Humanities.