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Computer-Assisted Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages

The production of digital critical editions of texts using TEI is now a widely-adopted procedure within digital humanities. The work described in this paper extends this approach to the publication of gnomologia (anthologies of wise sayings), which formed a widespread literary genre in many cultures of the medieval Mediterranean. These texts are challenging because they were rarely copied straightforwardly; rather, sayings were selected, reorganised, modified or re-attributed between manuscripts, resulting in a highly interconnected corpus for which a standard approach to digital publication is insufficient. Focusing on Greek and Arabic collections, we address this challenge using semantic web techniques to create an ecosystem of texts, relationships and annotations, and consider a new model - organic, collaborative, interconnected, and open-ended - of what constitutes an edition. This semantic web-based approach allows scholars to add their own materials and annotations to the network of information and to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings.