WHAT YOU EVER READ? AUTOMATED COMPARISON OF PUBLISHING VARIATIONS IN A CONTEMPORARY LANGUAGE ROMAN TEXT

This article describes a project comparing 11 editions of Thomas Mann’s novel “The Magic Mountain” (1924). The aim hereby is to develop computer-based tools that enable automated text-processing with only a small amount of additional manual work. After scanning a few chapters of the novel the pictures are converted into text-files. The texts are dehyphenated, OCR-errors are corrected automatically.
By way of comparison all differences between them are revealed, i.e. punctuation, spelling and lexical modifications. The text of the first edition from 1924 and the variants found in all other editions are combined to a new critical edition.