The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

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Hermeneutic and Non-Hermeneutic Accesses to Cultures

Motti Benari (Tel Aviv University)
Text, Intertextuality and Culture

In the project CULTOS (Cultural Units of Learning - Tools and Services, http://www.cultos.org/index.html) we developed new cultural units. We call such units: "Intertextual Threads". An Intertextual Thread is a digital unit which incorporates three types of data:

  1. Texts. We use the term "text" to denote any object, whose semiotic significance is under study.
  2. "Descriptions" (additional information about the texts). Thread builders can add data concerning the text's nature, qualities, and other features.
  3. Intertextual data. A text and its description form an entity. Thread builders can associate any two entities, by defining the intertextual relations between them.

Defining intertextual relations is the main goal of creating a thread - portraying the diversity and the complexity of the relations between texts, texts' segments or texts' components (e.g., characters, stylistic patterns, ideology).
The intertextual thread is general enough to be viewed as a new cultural unit, alongside other established cultural units, such as a paper, a book, or a power point presentation. The future use of threads may be valuable for many purposes, and we tend to group these into three categories:

In the presentation I discuss the major advantages and disadvantages of using intertextual threads for sharing scientific and cultural information and argue that intertextual threads seem to have an excellent potential of becoming a complementary standard cultural unit for any sort of comparative research, and for cultural preservation in digital libraries.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES