Workshop: Re-late – Re-Use – Re-Work. Potentials for Variant and Intertextuality Analyses in the Digital Humanities

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new possibilities for the computational analysis of literary and historical texts. In digital scholarly editing and computational literary studies in particular, an important question is how such models can support the identification and analysis of complex relationships between texts. The workshop “re-late – re-use – re-vise” explored this potential through a central use case: the identification, visualisation and analysis of textual variants and intertextual relations. 

About the Project 

The full-day workshop took place on 4 December 2025 at the University of Vienna and brought together researchers from literary studies, digital scholarly editing, Digital Humanities and related disciplines. Methodological contributions and concrete application examples presented different approaches to the computational analysis of textual variants, adaptations and intertextual relations. 

A central question was how Large Language Models and related computational methods can help identify semantically and contextually similar passages, including within large textual corpora. Topics included methods for analysing and visualising complex textual variants, multilingual text alignment, the study of literary versions and textual transmission, as well as the automated identification of indirect quotations. 

Particular attention was given to the methodological reflection of these new possibilities. LLM-based approaches were not considered a replacement for established philological methods, but rather a complement to existing qualitative and quantitative approaches. The workshop also highlighted challenges relevant to future research, including the quality and comparability of results, the adaptation of models to historical and literary texts, and the development of interoperable annotations and standards. 

Researchers from a range of Austrian and international institutions contributed to the event, including the University of Vienna, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Cologne, the University of Hamburg, Klassik Stiftung Weimar and KNAW Amsterdam. The workshop therefore encouraged exchange between digital scholarly editing, literary studies and current AI-based methods while strengthening connections within the international Digital Humanities community. 

The presentation slides and further workshop materials were subsequently collected and made openly available via Zenodo .