Computational text analysis investigates citation patterns across digital and print editions of Cædmon's Hymn, highlighting shifts in academic referencing.
Philology has been relying on editions of primary sources for centuries. How do scholars cite digital editions of texts? As more scholarly editions move online, researchers suspect that digital editions are cited differently from traditional print ones. The Cædmon Citation Network project investigates these patterns. We focus on Cædmon's Hymn, one of the oldest surviving English poems: it is short, and it exists in a great variety of editions, both print and digital. The corpus is drawn from the bibliography of O'Donnell's 2005 digital edition and includes editions of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica containing the Hymn, standalone editions, and studies of the poem: 233 items in total, spanning the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. A custom Python OCR pipeline converts PDF sources to machine-readable text; citations are then classified as cited, used for text, or used for commentary using an open-access Gemma model, which returns structured JSON for auditing. The expected outcome is a map of citation practices across editions. This poster presents the project design and preliminary work.
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Tessa Bordalejo (2026) studied this question.
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