A top-down approach to the design of components for the philological domain

This paper focuses on the methodology applied to the development of components in the domain of collaborative philology in the Memorata Poetis Project. This initiative, led by the University of Venice, coordinates eight units sharing the same cyber-infrastructure and is co-funded by the Italian Ministry of Instruction, University and Research (PRIN 2010/11). The project aims to study the multilingual intertextuality between epigraphic texts and literary epigrams, the transmission of themes, motives, etc. between different communicative situations (epigraphic versus literary) and different civilisations (Greek, Latin and Italian). As a control group, we analyse a corpus of epigraphic and literary texts in Arabic which do not belong to the same tradition as the others. The study of intertextuality affects both the reconstruction of the text (constitutio textus), by providing variants from the indirect tradition, and its interpretation (interpretatio), by widening the contexts in which the text has been reused.