By Matteo Romanello
The Ajax Multi-Commentary is a research project led by Matteo Romanello at the University of Lausanne, department of Classics and Archeology, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
This project deals with the scholarly tradition of writing commentaries about literary works, a tradition that goes back almost as long as those texts themselves — from the famous Alexandrian reception of Homer’s epics to Dante’s Divina Commedia, the Talmud or Shakespeare’s tragedies. In a nutshell, a commentary is a collection of glosses presenting the reader with any information that is deemed important for the reading and understanding of a given text (e.g., translation; metrical scansion; remarks about the mise en scène; bibliographic references to primary and secondary literature ad locum).
The Ajax Multi-Commentary project explores the notion of digital multi-commentary by taking the commentary’s tradition of Sophocles’ Ajax as a case study, which consists of about 15 commentaries, written in several language (Latin, English French, German, and Italian) and published between 1835 and 2011. Focusing on the historical and epistemological dimension of this body of commentaries, the project will study the history of this genre and of its exegetic practices, and in particular how the various commentaries have contributed to shaping our reading and understanding of this text. In fact, when considered from a history of science perspective, each commentary is a fossilized testimony of reading and understanding a literary text as a historically-situated intellectual process.
In order to enable an epistemological study of this corpus of commentaries, a digital multi-commentary is being developed to read, compare and analyze this tragedy’s commentary tradition. Layout detection and OCR of the digitized commentaries constitute the first necessary steps for the creation of multi-commentary interfaces for both close and distant reading. Further processing steps will entail the linking of the commentary section (or lemma) with the portion of text it refers to, the alignment of commentaries with one another, as well as the semi-automatic enrichment of the commentary sections (e.g. by means of named entity processing and citation mining).
