Electronic Text Reuse Acquisition Project

Marco Büchler, Maria Moritz
Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Göttingen

eTRAP is an Early Career Research Group funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The research group, starting on 1st March 2015, was awarded €1.6 million and runs for four years, supporting four full-time researchers and eight student assistants. As the name suggests, this interdisciplinary team studies the linguistic and literary phenomenon that is text reuse, with a particular focus on historical languages. More specifically, we look at how ancient authors copied, alluded to, paraphrased and translated each other as they spread their knowledge in writing. This early career research group seeks to provide a basic understanding of the historical text reuse methodology (it being distinct from plagiarism), and so to study what defines text reuse, why some people reuse information, how text is reused and how this practice has changed over history.

This short presentation will serve as an introduction to the current activities and the interdisciplinary research conducted by eTRAP.