This is a "sequence alignment" problem,and a lot of relevant algorithms are used in bioinformatics. Your best help may come from such tools as Philomine, the ARTFL sequence alignment program, which has been used very successfully to trace the sources of Diderot's Encyclopedie.
The ARTFL people are very helpful. Closer to home, there is the e-aqua group in Leipzig. Marco Büchler, a computer scientist there, has worked a lot on quotation tracking in Latin texts.
There isn't, to my knowledge, a user-friendly tool that lets you do this stuff "out of the box." But it's a pretty well-understood problem with a lot of solutions.
MM
On 1/2/12 10:35 AM, "Christian Schwaderer" christian.schwaderer@student.uni-tuebingen.de wrote:
Hi all,
I have a research problem which I think could be easily solved by an appropriate software - if there is such a software.
The problem is: I want do know whether Hincmar of Reims quotes somewhere in his many texts Aulus Cornelius Celsus. The texts form both authors are all digital available (dMGH, Brepolis Text Bases, Patrologia Latina Database), but is there any program that could search all these texts for similarities in wording and find phrases containing the same words - even in different word forms, order etc.? I doubt it, but I hope there is such a tool I don't know yet.
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