Introduction to the Panel on reuse of Texts, Images and Ideas

For most of human history, the essential nature of creativity was understood to be cumulative and collective. This notion has been largely forgotten by modern policies that regulate creativity and speech. As hard as it may be to believe, the most valuable components of our immortal culture were created under a fully open regime with regard to access to pre-existing expressions and re-use. From the Platonic mimesis to Shakespeare's "borrowed feathers," the largest part of our culture has been produced under a paradigm in which imitation-even plagiarism-and social authorship formed constitutive elements of the creative moment. Pre-modern creativity spread from a continuous line of re-use and juxtaposition of pre-existing expressive content, transitioning from orality to textuality and then melding the two traditions. The cumulative and collaborative character of the oralformulaic tradition dominated the development of epic literature. The literary pillars of Western culture, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were fully forged in the furnace of that tradition. Later, under the aegis of Macrobius' art of rewriting and the Latin principles of imitatio, medieval epics grew out of similar dynamics of sharing and recombination of formulas and traditional patterns. Continuations, free re-use, and the re-modeling of iconic figures and characters, such as King Arthur and Roland, made chansons de geste and romance literature powerful vehicles in propelling crosscountry circulation of culture.

Tatjana Bartsch, Marcus Becker, Horst Bredekamp, Charlotte Schreiter (Eds.): Das Originale der Kopie. Kopien als Produkte und Medien der Transformation von Antike, Transformationen der Antike Vol. 17 (Berlin 2010), pp. 27-42.

The Digital Classicist 2013. BICS Supplement 2013, 2013

The cover image is of a torso of Pothos (Roman 1st century BC -1st century AD) in the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal. Photo

Master Drawings, 30, 1 (1992), pp. 83-108, 1992

“Adaptive reuse,” an influential theoretical concept in the field of architecture, describes the reuse of partly reconstructed buildings for purposes different from those for which they were originally erected. In the present volume, this concept is for the first time transferred from its edificial application to a wider specter of cultural activities, namely to the composition of texts and to the creation of concepts and rituals. The volume opens with an introduction in which the editors explain their understanding of of adaptive reuse and its innovative application to cultural studies. They differentiate between simple re-use and adaptive reuse as two ideal types of re(-)use. Simple re-use is the resumption of a previous use without a strong change of purpose. An item is simply used again, because it is readily available. Adaptive reuse implies more. The reuser aims at well-definable purposes, e.g., adding prestige, credibility or authority to the newly created work. The reused elements have therefore to be recognizable. Adaptive reuse ideally involves a strong change of usage, and it is not primarily motivated economically. The twelve main chapters of the volume are divided into four thematic sections. Section 1, “Adaptive Reuse of Indian Philosophy and Other Systems of Knowledge,” consists of five case studies by Philipp Maas, Himal Trikha, Ivan Andrijanic, Yasutaka Muroya and Malhar Kulkarni dealing with the adaptive reuse of Sanskrit philosophical and grammatical texts in Sanskrit works of philosophy, grammar and poetry. In all these cases, adaptive reuse serves the creation of new forms and contents within a traditionally established framework in which the prestige of the sources of adaptive reuse reflects upon its target. In the second section, entitled “Adaptive Reuse of Tropes,” Elena Mucciarelli and Cristina Bignami analyze the motif of the chariot in Vedic, medieval and contemporary works and rituals and fruitfully employ the concept of adaptive reuse in various religious contexts. The chapters of the third section “Adaptive Reuse of Untraced and Virtual Texts” by Daniele Cuneo, Kiyokazu Okita, Elisa Freschi and Cezary Galewicz deal again with philosophical and religious texts, this time focusing on the adaptive reuse of sources that are no longer available or did never exist. It emerges from these studies that reuse of virtual texts was frequently intended to support the introduction of innovations into established traditions. In some cases, the prestige of the reusing works even reflected back on the allegedly reused source. Finally, the chapter by Sven Sellmer in the fourth section “Reuse from the Perspective of the Digital Humanities” deals with the computer-based identification of possibly reused text-passages in epic literature that otherwise would remain undetectable.

Elisa Freschi and Philipp A. Maas (eds.), "Adaptive Reuse: Aspects of Creativity in South Asian Cultural History. Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 101. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz , 2017

The seven articles presented in the third edition of the MEMSA journal were initially presented as papers at MEMSA’s eleventh annual postgraduate conference, ‘Imitation and Innovation: Uses of the past in the Medieval and Early Modern World’ (Durham University, July 2017). CONTENTS: Dominic Birch, Kelly Clarke and Katie Haworth, INTRODUCTION: THE USES OF THE PAST IN THE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN WORLD pp. 6-11 Thomas Spray, V FOR VÍGA-KÁRI: FAKE NEWS, “NOTORIOUS FAME”, AND VICTORIAN READINGS OF NJÁLS SAGA, pp. 12-46 Sarah Hutcheson, MAPPING PROTESTANT THEOLOGY: MEDIEVAL CARTOGRAPHIC ELEMENTS IN WILLIAM PERKINS’S VISUAL ORDO SALUTIS, pp. 47-56 Andrew Bull, THE ADAPTATION OF SAINT’S LIVES IN MEDIEVAL CHANT: REMEMBRANCE AND REQUEST, pp. 57-75 Ann Sheffield, THE HEATHEN SUBALTERN SPEAKS: TENTH-CENTURY POETRY IN THIRTEENTH-CENTURY NARRATIVES OF ICELAND’S CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY, pp. 76-93 Caitlin Scott, APPEALING TO THE MASSES: LITURGY, BELLS, AND EARLY MEDIEVAL CHURCH TOWERS, pp. 94-114 Rachel Fennell, TO BE AND NOT TO BE: SHAKESPEARE’S UNDEAD PRINCESSES, pp. 115-128 Alice Stamataki, INTERTEXTUALITY, NARRATIVE TRANSMISSIONS, AND ARTHURIAN ANALOGUES IN SUPERHERO COMIC BOOKS, pp. 129-150 MEMSA 2018, p. 151

2017

To fortify the research of automated, historical text reuse detection, it is necessary to investigate the way in which a text is reused (e.g., verbatim, paraphrased) in order to understand the broader context of a reuse. Our long-term goal is to build a formal theory behind reuse transformations. We have previously investigated two datasets of Bible reuse to analyze how reuse is modified and how linguistic resources support this. In this work, we investigate the ratio of non-literal text reuse, and we measure to which extent the Ancient Greek WordNet—which also contains Latin WordNet— and BabelNet can support identifying lexical relations in Latin reuse excerpts. In doing so, we also show the lack and need of resources for ancient data.

2006

is characterized by the reappearance of figures and motifs replicated through the reuse of cartoons. Perugino's deliberate self-plagiarism, despite being rooted in quattrocento compositional methods, exhibits an exploitation of the reproductive nature of the cartoon. While this practice allowed him to develop an efficient design process, the results of this imitation endowed Perugino's work with a formulaic quality, as was first noted by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1 568). Significantly, in the sixteenth century, theorists revised the concept of imitation to incorporate not only the notion of replication, but emulation as well. An examination of Perugino's reproductive practices alongside this revised view of imitation elucidates the nature of Vasari's criticism, ultimately revealing why the critic placed him among artists of the quattrocento, rather than that of the cinquecento.

Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2016

Text reuse refers to citing, copying or alluding text excerpts from a text resource to a new context. While detecting reuse in contemporary languages is well supported-given extensive research, techniques, and corporaautomatically detecting historical text reuse is much more difficult. Corpora of historical languages are less documented and often encompass various genres, linguistic varieties, and topics. In fact, historical text reuse detection is much less understood and empirical studies are necessary to enable and improve its automation. We present a linguistic analysis of text reuse in two ancient data sets. We contribute an automated approach to analyze how an original text was transformed into its reuse, taking linguistic resources into account to understand how they help characterizing the transformation. It is complemented by a manual analysis of a subset of the reuse. Our results show the limitations of approaches focusing on literal reuse detection. Yet, linguistic resources can effectively support understanding the non-literal text reuse transformation process. Our results support practitioners and researchers working on understanding and detecting historical reuse.