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The development of a prototype platform that will allow scholars to combine distant and close reading methods to discover relationships between texts and identify texts in collections for further study.

We seek Level II funding for a pilot project to develop a model that will allow scholars to bridge the gap between distant and close reading when conducting research on large, heterogeneous digital text collections. We propose to create a language agnostic environment—called the Intertextual Hub—in which the conceptual relationships among texts discovered by text-mining algorithms can fruitfully guide close reading in dialectical interaction with distant reading. Fundamentally, we are contending that the core of scholarly reading in the digital age should be the discovery and navigation of intertextual relationships. The Intertextual Hub will be a powerful hermeneutical device allowing users to navigate between individual texts and larger corpora that are related through shared themes, ideas, and passages. Focusing on the French Revolutionary period, we will test this model by applying it to the extensive and diverse 18th-century French collections of UChicago’s ARTFL Project.