Modelling and Visualising Critical Reading through an Intertextual Interface

Abstract

The LdoD Archive: Collaborative Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet was published on the web in December 2017. Since then, several new modules have been added to functionalities of the platform. The latest component is the “LdoD Critical Reading” module, originally conceived and designed as a heuristic tool for representing and analysing critical readings of Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Through this “Critical Reading” module, the LdoD Archive will provide a resource for analysing reading protocols of various interpretive communities at different moments in the history of the reception of the work (1977-2018). This article explains our computational model for encoding and processing multiple intertextual relations: those that link critical texts to the Book of Disquiet; those that link critical texts to other texts; and those that link critical texts to each other. We will show how our interface for textual representation enables users to move across the corpus of critical texts and explore intertextual relations by combining multiple visualisations according to user-defined criteria. Designed as a pilot project for analysing the critical readings of the Book of Disquiet, our computational and visualisation model is based on a theory about the textual production of intertextuality that we have tried to translate into the constraints and affordances of the interface.

Keywords

• ldod archive
• critical reading
• intertextuality
• computational modelling
• visualisation