"Repetition Analyses Function (ReAF)"
Armin Hoenen
Texttechnology Lab, Johann- Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt
The ReAF is a dynamic heat map developed to represent exact and bag-of-words based repetitions in digitisations of verse bound text. Verse itself is a repetition in linguistic patterning, text itself is a visualisation of speech. In this sense, line breaks are a visualisation technique based on the repetition of linguistic patterning, which the ReAF maintains. Verse bound text existed prior to the invention of script; the first written literary produce of cultures is usually in verse. In their seminal work, Lord (1960) and Parry (1971) attempted to explain the peculiarities of one such text, the Odyssey, by investigating a living oral tradition in Yugoslavia. They invented the Oral Formulaic Theory and showed how bardic composition in performance works. No single author exists but formula and story lines are passed on from generation to generation; the actual performance is always a unique text and no two performances of the same epic are the same. Their conclusion is that one original text of the Odyssey does not exist, has never existed and cannot even exist. Lord and Parry developed tests for the orality of a given text, where they used underlining of repeated passages or formula. To compile this visualisation in the print age required a lot of manual labour, so they largely limited themselves to shorter passages such as the beginning of the Odyssey. This limitation was criticised later on for instance by Finnegan (1992) who misses a complete statistical analyses. The ReAF is a holistic extension of that late print age visualisation of repetition in verse bound text. It uses HTML and JavaScript in order to generate a very simple preprocessing, platform and browser independent interactive visualisation, where the user can navigate the text to verify or falsify his/her assumptions on text genesis and text category. References Lord, A. B. (1960). The Singer of Tales. Harvard University Press. Parry, M. (1971). The making of Homeric verse: the collected papers of Milman Parry. Clarendon Press. Finnegan, R. (1992). Oral Poetry. Indiana University Press.