Representation and analysis of content structure elements in Saint Petersburg Corpus of Hagiographic Texts (SCAT)

SCAT is a digital corpus of Old Russian hagiographic texts of 15th - 17th centuries created at the Department of Mathematical Linguistics of Saint Petersburg State University. The project involved the introduction of morphological and syntactic markup as well as markup of content structure elements. The first task was to markup meaningful parts (or chapters). The analysis of the texts, which constitute the corpus, allowed to establish a plot structure common to the texts. Markup of the plot components and creation of tables of contents provided an opportunity to work with certain parts of texts and compare similar chapters in different texts. Another task within the framework of the project implied research and markup of biblical, patristic and liturgical quotes in corpus texts. The study of quote distribution in texts and different chapters of the plot enabled the author to reveal the trends in the use of quotes and define the quotes typical of certain parts of the plot. One more task involved markup of repeating text fragments. Research on the texts of SCAT corpus disclosed numerous text excerpts reproduced by different authors. Such extracts are being marked up and links to the original texts are provided. The markup allows to create a register of such fragments, thus simplifying further research of new texts.