Ajax Multi-Commentary Project
Available
- Ajax Multi-Commentary project: https://mromanello.github.io/ajax-multi-commentary/
- Code repository: https://github.com/ajaxMultiCommentary
Editor
- Matteo Romanello (Principal Investigator)
- Carla Amaya
- Kevin Duc
- Sven Najem-Meyer
- Charles Pletcher
Description
The Ajax Multi-Commentary is a research project focussing on the scholarly tradition of writing commentaries on literary works, a practice dating back to Homer, Dante, the Talmud, and Shakespeare. A commentary collects glosses providing readers with translations, metrical notes, remarks on staging, bibliographic references, and other contextual information to facilitate understanding of a text.
The project uses the commentary tradition of Sophocles’ Ajax as a case study, comprising about 15 commentaries written in Latin, English, French, German, and Italian, published between 1835 and 2011. By focusing on the historical and epistemological dimensions of this commentary corpus, the project investigates how these works have shaped reading and understanding of Ajax over time. Each commentary is considered a fossilized testimony of a historically-situated intellectual process.
To enable an epistemological study of these commentaries, a digital multi-commentary is being developed to read, compare, and analyze the corpus. Key technical steps include:
- Layout detection and OCR of digitized commentaries for interface creation suitable for both close and distant reading
- Linking commentary sections (lemmas) with the portions of text they refer to
- Alignment of commentaries with one another to enable comparative study
- Semi-automatic enrichment of commentary sections using named entity recognition and citation mining
The project produces digital tools, pipelines, and datasets that are openly available for scholarly use and further development.