Chris Forstall

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University of Geneva

The study of intertextuality, or how authors make artistic use of other texts in their works, has a long tradition, and has in recent years benefited from a variety of applications of digital methods. This article describes an approach for detecting the sorts of intertexts that literary scholars have found most meaningful, as embodied in the free T...

Tesserae is a web-based tool for automatically detecting allusions in Latin poetry. Although still in the start-up phase, it already is capable of identifying significant numbers of known allusions, as well as similar numbers of allusions previously unnoticed by scholars. In this article, we use the tool to examine allusions to Vergil’s Aeneid in t...

This paper describes a new digital approach to intertextual study involving the creation of a free online tool for the automatic detection of parallel phrases. A test comparison of Vergil’s Aeneid and Lucan’s Civil War shows that the tool can identify a substantial number of meaningful intertexts, both previously recorded and unrecorded. Analysis o...

In this study, we use computational methods to evaluate and quantify philological evidence that an eighth century CE Latin poem by Paul the Deacon was influenced by the works of the classical Roman poet Catullus. We employ a hybrid feature set composed of n-gram frequencies for linguistic structures of three different kinds—words, characters, and m...

To be able to capture repetitive sound in a feature for authorship and stylistic analysis is of great interest. In this paper, we present the functional n-gram as a feature well suited to the analysis of poetry and other sound-sensitive material, working toward stylistics based on sound rather than text. Using Support Vector Machines (SVM) for text...

Continuing our study (2, 3) of repetitive sound and its relationship to style in poetry, this talk introduces a variety of statistical features found to be useful descriptors of Latin elegiac couplets (for background, see (4)). Using computational statistical methods, we have undertaken a broad survey of Latin elegiac poets. The elegiac meter is us...