Quotation detection: Hamlet
Quotation detection: Hamlet
Finally, texts can be reused and repurposed at finer levels of granularity than an entire book or substantial work. A few words or lines from a text may be quoted for lending an epigraph or illustrating a critic discussion. For instance, we can map this smaller-scale text reuse with a canonical literary text like Hamlet.
At the top are listed the acts and scenes of the play. Below are histograms showing the amount of textual overlap between each line and various other books. Five Tragedies, for instance, contains the complete text of Hamlet and thus overlaps completely. But we can also see other genres such as a Dictionary of Shakespeare, which uses quotes to illustrate word definitions, or The Canadian Elocutionist, which excerpts speeches for practice by aspiring public speakers, or The riddles of Hamlet and the newest answers, which is a work of literary criticism.
We display these automatically extracted patterns of text reuse with the Highbrow visualization tool from the Harvard Library Lab.