Improving Labbé’s Intertextual Distance: Testing a Revised Version on a Large Corpus of Italian Literature

Moving from Labbé’s proposal envisaging the use of intertextual distance to measure the similarity (and dissimilarity) of texts, this paper proposes a new calculation procedure based on repeated observations of intertextual distance between pairs of equal-sized text chunks. The implementation of this procedure on a large corpus including 160 Italian novels provides information on the values produced by measuring intertextual distance in (both lemmatized and non-lemmatized) literary texts written in Italian. In order to show the improvement achieved through this iterative procedure compared to the original version, distance values are assessed in terms of their ability to recognize the author as the factor responsible for text pairing.