Biblical intertextuality in a digital world: the tool GERTRUDE

Over centuries texts of all genres have been connected by quotes, allusions, idioms, stylistic imitations and many more. Understanding literature means understanding these kinds of intertextual relations. The goal of the Göttingen sub-project of eTRACES, an interdisciplinary project of humanists and computer scientists, is to enable research on this essential part of literary studies. We are creating a digital working environment, a tool called GERTRUDE (Göttingen E-Research: Text Re-Use for Digital Editions), in an effort to determine whether and to what degree such a tool can support a researcher in finding, marking and annotating intertextual relations: - Especially in big text corpora, looking for intertextual relations can be very time-consuming. So Text-Mining-algorithms are integrated to determine so called "textual re-use", hoping also to find interesting textual relations not yet known or expected (serendipity effect). - For referencing an exact text passage, the TextGrid Citation Schema is used, because it enables us to mark up a segment of text down to the granularity of letters and to address different editions of a text. - The possibilities and limitations of annotating or even evaluating a text passage in its relation to others, its form, function and"degree"of intertextuality will be researched by creating this tool as a crowd-sourcing environment: It is usable by everyone interested and it is also integrated in university courses, where students are encouraged to use it. By this means it is possible to compare and discuss the results as well as the usability, possibilities and limitations of the tool. Our approach is based on German literature from 1500s to 1900s and is part of a BMBF-sponsored text corpus available under a Creative Commons License online. In the future it will be possible to use other corpora, even in languages other than German, if the algorithms are adapted. Because of its great influence, we chose the Luther-Bible and its re-use in German literature as a use case.