a blog by Peter Leonard
A quick look at an in-house tool we’re developing at the Yale Digital Humanities Lab. The example corpus in this case is a collection of 19th-century Swedish novels, but the approach is language-agnostic. We’ve also tested it on Camus and picked up his weaving of passages from previous works (Carnets, La mort heureuse) into The Stranger.
In this particular case, the tool is showing a case of literary plagiarism: a book in 1900 steals dozens of passages from a novel from 60 years earlier. We have a chapter that came out last year that explains the context for this particular case of literary “borrowing” — but there are undoubtably many more yet to be discovered as more books are digitized.