Ruse of reuse: Detecting text-similarity with AI in historical sources

Session

Session 2

5 Mar 2026, 13:00

Seminary rooms 7 and 8, 5th Floor (Georg-Coch-Platz 2, Austrian Academy of Sciences)

7. Automatic cataloguing of the Books of Hours. Textual unit identification and structural annotation

Svetlana Yatsyk (IRHT, CNRS)

05/03/2026, 13:00

The talk will deal with rule-based approaches, which allow us to establish a baseline that will be further used to assess the benefits of the LLMs (both in detection quality and computational cost).

8. Does AI break the chains of Prometheus? Or how AI can advance the analytical possibilities of the Latin Text Archive (LTA)

Tim Geelhaar (Goethe Universität)

05/03/2026, 13:30

Artificial Intelligence has long played a role in Digital Humanities. Since the 2000s, methods using Machine Learning and Deep Learning have been tested and applied successfully, especially for tasks like reusing and comparing texts. The Latin Text Archive (LTA), which is a platform designed for historical semantic analysis of medieval Latin texts, once offered such features. However, due to...

9. How to Align Medieval Prose Texts and Other Impossibilities

Gabriel Viehhauser (Universität Wien)

05/03/2026, 14:00

The lecture takes its starting point from a concrete practical example, namely the planned digital edition of “Der Heiligen Leben, Redaktion”, a late medieval collection of legends about saints. This collection exists in two different text versions, created in quick succession, whose differences are relevant for the cultural-historical context of the legends. Since the texts are in prose, it...