string searches and n-grams

Cite Environment

string searches

String searches are naturally quite fun and something that still needs to be done more comprehensively in the Homeric scholia. Fun ones you might want to check out would be searches for the Homeric editors Ζηνοδοτος and Αρισταρχος. The tool will bring up all the passages where they appear for you to look at more closely.

Using n-grams to Explore Formulaic Language

What is an n-gram

A string of n number of words (or letters), usually used to find repeated phrases in a corpus. Today, we’ll look at n-grams in the Homeric scholia.

How to use the tool

You can set length of the n-gram with the dropdown menu and filter by how frequently you want it to appear.

Some cool examples

Try 3 by 3 and you’ll see that ὅτι Ζηνόδοτος γράφει appears 16 times in the scholia of book 1. (That’s out of roughly 1500 scholia). And ὅτι Ζηνοδοτος γράφει appears an additonal 13 times. That’s 29 instances of a formulaic expression.