Dear Christian,

as Martin suggested, ARTFL is a good address to ask questions.

You could also start with concordances (get both texts into AntConc, for example: http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/antconc_index.html; the program is quite user-friendly, once you understand the basics).

Another solution would be to install PhiloLogic (http://sites.google.com/site/philologic3/home/philologic-3-2-beta-release) locally, on your computer. Then put one text in its database, turn another into a list of words -- and, possibly, bigrams or trigrams - and then query the database automatically (well, semi-automatically -- it would take several scripts), sending the list to PhiloLogic.

An understanding of regular expressions would also come in handy, but this is pure joy if you're a linguist or a philologist (this is where I learnt regexps: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/services/helpsheets/unix/regex.html).

So you would search e. g. for the bigram

"arma uirumque"

and also for

"arm* uir*"

Here is what would such searches turn up in the Croatiae auctores Latini collection:

http://www.ffzg.unizg.hr/klafil/croala/cgi-bin/search3t?dbname=croala&word=arma+Uirumque http://www.ffzg.unizg.hr/klafil/croala/cgi-bin/search3t?dbname=croala&word=arm*+Uiru*

(PhiloLogic can be tuned for distances between words etc.)

Best,

Neven

Neven Jovanovic Department of Classical Philology Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Zagreb Hrvatska / Croatia

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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Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gidI320313760 Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l