The Electronic Manipulus florum Project

The Janus Intertextuality Search Engine

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Since August 2013 the entire edited text of the Manipulus florum has been available for searching with Janus.

The Janus search engine, which was launched in November 2008 in support of this website, was created by Andrew Kane, a doctoral student working under the supervision of Dr. Frank Tompa of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo; and Dr. Kane kindly continues to maintain Janus. The design of this search engine was inspired by the online anti-plagiarism service turnitin.com. Unlike a typical search engine that only allows users to search for a few words or a phrase, Janus enables users to paste long passages or entire texts into the search field in order to generate an intertextuality report, similar to the "originality report" produced by turnitin.com. Because the Manipulus florum was employed by late medieval and early modern authors as a resource for finding authoritative quotations that could be incorporated into their own compositions, this type of search engine is ideally suited for research to determine its reception in later texts. It should also expedite scholars' editorial work by quickly identifying some of the sources, whether they are cited as such or not, that are embedded in the text they are studying, because each "hit" on the intertextuality report is linked to the fons/fontes apparatus document for that entry in the Manipulus.

For more information on the search engine and its utility for scholarship, see the technical report by Kane and Tompa and the editor's article:

- Andrew Kane & Frank Tompa (2011). "Janus: the Intertextuality Search Engine for the Electronic Manipulus florum Project," Literary and Linguistic Computing 26.4, 407-15.

- Chris L. Nighman (2012). "The Janus Intertextuality Search Engine: A Research Tool of (and for) the Electronic Manipulus florum Project," Digital Medievalist 7.

For an Open Source intertextuality search engine that allows users to upload two different texts for comparative analysis, see Factotum, developed in 2010 by a team of medieval scholars and computer scientists at Monash University.

Since 2015 another Open Source intertextuality search engine named TRACER, described as a "text reuse detection tool," has been offered by eTRAP (electronic Text Reuse Acquisition Project) at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.