Exploring Dante’s Sources Online: Interactive Reading, Visualizations, and the Study of Dantean Intertextuality in the Digital Age

Dante’s Commedia is a highly allusive text, and readers throughout time have noted the many parallels between Dante’s verses and those of others. Now that the text of the Commedia and various scholarly and artistic interpretations of the poem (commentaries, translations, illuminated manuscripts) have become accessible online, also the concordance, the lists of parallel passages in Dante’s poem and other works, has become a digital resource. In this essay I explore the study of Dante’s sources in a digital environment mainly through the Intertextual Dante project and its Dante-Ovid edition, published on Digital Dante. Intertextual Dante visualizes moments of Dante’s text reuse: its interactive reading interface presents parallel passages side by side, and allows users to search, analyze, and interpret these passages in their broader textual contexts. I further review the advances in (semi-)automated detection of text reuse are reviewed in the context of Dante’s allusive and intertextual practices, and consider the knowledge base on Dante’s use of primary sources and the commentaries on the Commedia that the Hypermedia Dante Network project will provide.

Keywords: Intertextuality, Text reuse, Commedia, Ovid, Digital humanities