JOURNAL ARTICLE

LERA—an interactive platform for synoptical representations of multiple text witnesses.

  • Published In: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2023, v. 38, n. 1. P. 330 1 of 3

  • Database: Academic Search Ultimate 2 of 3

  • Authored By: Pöckelmann, Marcus; Medek, André; Ritter, Jörg; Molitor, Paul 3 of 3

Abstract

The article presents LERA (Locate, Explore, Retrace and Apprehend complex text variants), an interactive, web-based digital tool designed for the automatic collation and detailed comparison of multiple large text witnesses, such as entire chapters or books, in humanities research. LERA employs a two-stage collation process—first aligning larger text segments (e.g., paragraphs or sentences) across coequal witnesses using a heuristic graph-based algorithm, then performing detailed token-level comparisons with customizable normalization filters and interactive visualizations including close- and distant-reading modes. The platform supports various languages and scripts, including non-Latin alphabets like Arabic and Hebrew, and allows manual post-processing of alignments. LERA has been successfully applied in several digital humanities projects and continues to evolve with planned enhancements for handling larger witness sets and multilingual texts.

Additional Information

  • Source:Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 2023/04, Vol. 38, Issue 1, p330
  • Document Type:Article
  • Subject Area:Religion and Philosophy
  • Publication Date:2023
  • ISSN:2055-768X
  • DOI:10.1093/llc/fqac021
  • Accession Number:162941086
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