Text as a Graph

Computers have become indispensable for the storage, dissemination, and representation of literary and historical sources. What is more, computers can be used not only to assist our research practice, but also as research instruments in and by themselves. This means we have to represent texts in a way that is computationally processable. This entails thinking of text in radically different ways: text can be represented as a string of characters, as a tree, or as a graph. The project TAG, short for Text-As-Graph, examines the editing of literary and historical texts in a hypergraph data model. On a conceptual level, the graph model is interesting because it means letting go of the idea of a hierarchy and thus thinking without constraint about how we want to model our text as well as our knowledge of it. On an implementation level, we examine how the graph can best be used by the scholarly editor for it to become a proper research instrument.